Bakugou's Island
by Niether
Summary: After Both Bakugou Katsuki and Sophia Hess are marooned on a desert island, they must use both their powers and their wits to stay alive, live comfortable lives, and somehow escape.
1. Chapter 1

The rain fell in sheets, a torrential downpour that Sophia would come to accept came and went with a sort of regularity. It made for shit weather. Nothing could really be done outside the little cave she was hiding herself from the elements in, and there wasn't really anything to be done inside either. It wasn't very large, only going fifty feet back from the entrance before it narrowed so as to cut off any explorers who might try to plumb its hidden depths. It was mostly barren, too, a few dangling roots and a small pile of logs (Which may or may not dwindle before the rains subsided,) to feed the fire that kept most of the chill from her.

This left her restless, and though a restless Sophia Hess was not something anyone really wanted to stick around for, more than that it resulted in an awkward atmosphere, the kind of which was the dread of all teenagers, no matter how violent of a sociopath they might be. It didn't help that the blond boy who sat on the other side of her fire did nothing but glare at her.

Well, it was technically _his_ fire. He'd been the one to gather the wood, dry it to where it would burn, light it, and when the pile invariably ran out he'd probably be the one to repeat the process over again. Sophia was technically both in his debt and his guest. She had only stumbled on the cave when she'd spotted the glow through the foliage of the surrounding jungle.

Sophia hated it. She hated that she was stuck in the middle of nowhere with no memory of how she got there, she hated how she had been met with failure at every turn trying the find shelter, and she hated that some random Asian kid seemed to be thriving even though it looked like he was in the same boat as her.

She hated feeling helpless.

So every chance she got, every gesture or movement that she could manage to justify, she threw insults and expletives his was. He responded in kind, his own temper matching if not exceeding her own. He spoke gibberish words though, so before long their shouting matches devolved into nonsense where one would try to impress the uselessness and stupidity of the other _upon_ the other in a language that couldn't be understood.

So, after hours of fighting, though never coming to blows, and a sore throat later, they were left to glare at each other and squirm under that oppressive atmosphere akin to having just witnessed a fight between your best friend and their parents.

It sucked.

Bakugou didn't even realize he was wearing such an expression though. He was thinking, thinking harder than he ever thought he'd have to. He was by no means stupid, but when most of his problems growing up could be solved with a cocky grin or a demonstration of his quirk, he just didn't have as much practice as, say, Deku.

He'd been turning his brain in circles for the better part of an hour without any results, so he sighed and decided he'd start from the beginning and work his way forward.

Problem number one, that shithead Deku probably thought he'd won their fight. Entirely wrong, pulling a little stunt like blasting away the floor above them wouldn't be enough to win the exercise. Probably. Bakugou hadn't had the chance to see how Deku's stupid trick panned out. One second he was charging up a blast strong enough to make shitty Deku's shitty dad feel it, wherever he was, the next the blast goes off stronger than any explosion he'd ever made.

When the stars cleared from his eyes, he was standing in the middle of the mountains in pouring rain, surrounded by trees that made no goddamn sense.

Yeah. A blast like that not only blew Deku away, but his teammate a floor up too. No way he'd lost that fight. But, he realized, the unfortunate side effect of he himself being blasted to another region may give Deku the false notion that Bakugou had somehow lost. Ridiculous, but Deku was just the kind of little shit stain who'd believe it.

Not a lot he could do about that though until he got back to UA.

Which lead nicely into his second and third problem.

He needed to get back home, but he had no idea where he was, or how to act on the information even if he found out. As mentioned before, it looked like he was up in the mountains, but he didn't remember rain being quite so heavy, and the trees hadn't used to look like damn alien tentacle porn shit that Deku probably got off to, that sick fuck.

Maybe his already awesome quirk had grown so awesome that he could use it to blast his way to alien worlds? Bakugou thought about it for a second, but didn't take long to discard the idea. He'd heard of travel Quirks before, from running fast to sliding to teleporting. Quirks did one thing, and the best Bakugu could manage were a few tight maneuvers in air. As supremely impressive as that was, a clever application, really, that he doubted anyone would have come up with if they had his Quirk, it didn't really translate to dimensional travel.

Bakugou realized he'd just spent the last fifteen minutes on a pretty stupid tangent and growled in frustration. If fucking Deku was rubbing off on him, well, that was just another item to add to the list of reasons why Bakugou was going to punch his lights out when he got back.

His grunt was sharp enough to make the girl across from his jump.

Ah, right, problem number… five? Six? Bakugou had stopped keeping track. The point was that until he figured out a way home he was probably stuck with this yankee that had just shown up on his cave-step. Sure, he hadn't really got the impression she was the clingy/whiny type, like Deku, that piss sponge, but Bakugou had a strongly developed sixth sense, and he just knew these things.

He supposed he could have turned her away, foregone the entire issue, let her find her own place. But that wasn't what heroes did, and Bakugou was going to be the fucking best hero that surpassed even All Might. Can't let random teens go around dying of hypothermia while he was on the job. Off the job? Shit, were they going to count him truant for this?

Shit. Fucking Deku doing his best to ruin Bakugou's life yet again. Bakugou wasn't proud of many things, only how awesome he was, how awesome his quirk was, how clever he was about using it, how strong he was, how he could pretty much beat even most adults in a fight, and his class attendance. That last one was about to go bye bye, and it was more than likely Deku's fault.

Just another item to add to the list of reasons why Bakugou was going to punch his lights out when he got back.

He glanced back at the girl. She'd been drying out all afternoon, but since she'd refused to remove the many layers of black clothing she wore she probably wouldn't be completely dry until tonight at least. Stupid thing. Bakugou, confident paragon of masculinity, had no such qualms about shucking any soaked clothes. He sat cross legged in just his tank top and boxers. His own clothes had long since dried out, but he hadn't bothered to redress. The rain wasn't particularly cold and the fire was maybe just a little hotter than he'd expected when he first built it. He was comfortable like this, and if it seemed to bother the mysterious girl who enjoyed catching colds? A bonus.

And she _was_ a mystery. He knew she was american, but not much beyond that. He hadn't paid the most attention during his english classes, and she kept using words that sounded wrong even for english. She wasn't afraid to speak whatever nonsense was on her mind either, which had called for several arguments over the course of the day which, ultimately, resulted in nothing more than flared tempers and a stinging reminder that he didn't have any cough drops. Hadn't shouted like that since before Deku had turned into an even bigger wimp than he used to be.

She sneezed. God fucking dammit, she was going to catch a cold. This was not something Bakugou needed to deal with when they didn't even have a proper shelter. He jumped to his feet and walked towards her. With a start, she jumped away, her hand reaching for something at her hip.

"I've had e-fucking-nough of this jack fuckary. You catch a fucking cold out here and you're fucking dead, and the awesomest, strongest hero to ever be born won't let that happen, so," He punched his fist into his other hand, a brief flash playing with the shadows in the cave.

"Strip."

Sophia's eyes widened, but not noticeably so. She was too calm and collected to slip like that. She was just surprised, is all. She couldn't think of any moron stupid enough to brandish their powers out in the open like that, without even the barest thought paid to hiding their identity. Like he was used to doing it.

Her eyes narrowed. She hadn't understood what he'd said, like all the other times, but if he was a parahuman and gearing up for a fight, than she was more than ready for him. She almost slipped into her breaker state to get the drop on him, but hesitated. _She_ didn't have a mask on either. And while he might be ok with outing himself like that, she had too many enemies who'd love to know just who Shadow Stalker was underneath that mask.

She knew she'd be fine though. She still had her darts, even if the cross bow would out her, it's pretty hard to identify a slash to the thigh. All she had to do was avoid his hands, and if worse comes to worse, corpses keep secrets.

He gestured at her again, mumbling his garble. She crouched lower, and he growled, flexing his hands and setting off twin explosions, larger than the last one. He barked something, another curse? A threat? Regardless, all she had to do was wait for him to strike first. She knew the look of a cape who overcommitted to attacks.

He lunged and Sophia was ready. All it would take was a side step, an elbow to the spine, and he'd be down. It was a fool proof plan, except she had only just moved her foot and he was already behind her, propelled by a blast from his hands. She'd felt the barest hint of a tug as he passed, and her cloak had be snatched off her back.

She whorled around, readying herself for another attack, but he was already in the air.

 _WHOOSH,_ "Shit!"

 _WHOOSH,_ "Dammit!"

 _WHOOSH,_ "Mother of Fuck!"

All it had taken was thirty seconds and some tight maneuvers and the boy had managed to strip her down to her underwear. He'd even managed to snatch her utility belt. A small, irrational part of her felt a stab of irritation that he'd done it so quickly when on her best days it'd take her a good ten minutes to undress. The much larger, much more sarcastic part of her was impressed that she'd found the one cave in the world that belonged to some kind of Asian nudist with the most aggressive recruiting tactics.

He nodded to himself. He looked accomplished, that sick fuck. Bet he was proud of himself for stealing the clothes off a girl as sexy as her. She couldn't fault his taste, but if word got around then she'd probably be accosted at all hours by random chucklefucks trying to scope out her hot bod. Nope. There was only one recourse, Sophia decided. She'd have to kill him and bury the body, which ought to be a snap with her powers.

The boy tossed her clothes on a rack he'd made from the spare logs. They sat quite comfortably next to another outfit that mostly looked like some kind of dancer's outfit from a military themed strip club.

Oh. Okay. That, sorta made sense? He was drying them off, or something? Sophia was still pretty sure she could get away with murdering him if anyone asked, but she supposed she'd wait until her outfit was nice and toasty.

So, as bare as her counterpart, she sat by the fire.

Bakugou sat across from her with a _whoomf_.

It kept raining for some time, the sound drowning out the noises of the forest. Once or twice a wild animal would try to crawl inside, but it was driven easily away with a quick demonstration from Bakugou. Night fell, the rain persisted, and the light of the fire sent their shadows dancing to an absurd beat.


	2. Chapter 2

Bakugou was somewhere between Midoriya-won't-stop-talking pissed and Has-to-eat-cereal-with-juice pissed. It had been a couple of days since he'd been marooned on what he'd discovered was an island, not the mountains. (Fucking sand everywhere now, can't even wash it out cause it blends in with his hair.) and he didn't know if she was shy or stupid or just had a shitty Quirk, but he hadn't seen her use it once, and the longer and longer she went without showing it to him, the more he was worried that he'd once again been saddled with a useless, Quirkless, freak. It would be just his luck. At least she didn't talk as much as Midoriya. Well, maybe she did. He'd stopped paying attention to her by the second day, mostly pantomiming what he wanted her to do, whether it was foriege in the jungle or collect firewood or something else even a freak could handle.

He stomped his way through the trees he vaguely remembered from an old geography class. He'd decided he was tired of the green coconuts the yankee was bringing back and was searching for some real food. Of course, being in the ass crack middle of nowhere wasn't doing him any favors. He'd been hiking for a good hour and a half and he'd yet to encounter so much as a bush, or a tuber, or any sort of leafy greens or any animals or _anything_ to eat. Just coconuts. This did his pissy mood no favors and he was stuck stewing.

A half a week. Four days, now that he bothered to think about it, and the yankee hadn't accomplished much besides convincing him she was a jackass. She had a jackass attitude and she only found jackass food and she did a jackass job at literally everything he managed to get across to her with her jackass language.

She couldn't cook, she refused to do laundry, and she didn't even know how to build a hut. It was like she had zero skills. He'd found her once at the top of a tall cliff with no visible handholds, so he thought he could get her to do _something_ useful, like picking coconuts.

Boy oh fucking boy was that a bad idea. She did nothing but pick the damn things for the last two days and showed no signs of stopping, god knows what she planned to do with em all. Bakugou certainly wasn't going to eat them until they escaped.

Just another jackass habit she got from her jackass country, Bakugou assumed.

So there he was, wondering a jungle looking for literally anything that wouldn't kill him to eat. He was starting to give up on even that prerequisite, as each morning he'd wake up to more of the yankee's jackassery. Scrambling around and screaming like she dying or something. Some kinda pussy ass nightmares like Midoriya's wuss ass probably had.

He turned a corner, fully expecting to be met with the same, no-fucking-food jackass curse this shitty jungle seemed to be under. Instead, He found a clearing and the edge of a cliff that dropped straight down into the ocean. On that edge, soaking wet, looking chewed up and spit out, were one of those middle school girls that Midoriya got off to, that disgusting, shitty, fuck-shit stain.

He swaggered up to her prone form, only giving the slightest of glances at the edge. She was kinda close, actually. The drop was a sheer thirty feet and the waves crashed up and over with little trouble. If a particularly nasty wave hit, it wouldn't be all that strange if she was sucked back into the ocean. At least, that's where he assumed she came from. Well, not came from came from. He'd gotten the talk from his dad on his eleventh birthday after his mom came home drunk and nearly traumatized him with her own version.

Nearly. He was just a kid anyway, and Midoriya probably would have cried. Not Bakugou though. Nope.

So, he did what any kickass ultra hero would do and saved the innocent damsel in distress. All it took was a heave (Hot damn, she was as light as she looked, even soaking wet.) and he was headed back to their camp. Sadly, he was bereft of good ingredients for some real food, unless of course this new chick turned out to be as big a jackass as the last one. Bakugou decided he'd emasculate that bridge when he got to it.

The girl hadn't stirred at all. Not when he picked her up, not on the journey back, and not when he dropped her after slipping on a loose coconut. (Fucking yankee!) While this would have been of some concern to many people, piddle-shits like Midoriya for instance, Bakugou was completely at ease with the situation. He didn't fear brain damage, or a coma, or even death, and you shouldn't either. Why? Because the girl in question was perfectly healthy, if a bit roughed up. She was so deathly still because she was so deathly afraid.

Madison Clements was petrified in a more literal sense than usually implied. Understandably she was a bit put off by the turn her day had taken, and if she'd had any potential to trigger she probably would have. She didn't, because she didn't. She couldn't, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't, if she could. In another sense, may _be_ she wouldn't. Madison was a much less adventurous person than she let on.

Take for example, the cliff. Anyone else, after waking to find a young man slinging them on his shoulder, would have spoken up, corrected his discretion, maybe stabbed him a couple of times, just in case. Madison had frozen, and hadn't found the courage to let on that she wasn't anything more than a brain dead vegetable. Any time she heard him mumble it was in japanese, and all she couldn think of was how she'd blown off that one second year ABB kid to hang with Sophia and Emma. So, for her own sake, she stayed limp. She even turned it into a little game, to soothe her nerves somewhat.

Oh? He charged headlong into a bush and it smacked her in the face? Not a problem. What? He dropped her on the ground then landed elbow first on her? Please, something difficult at least. Hm? He was using her body as a kind of counterweight to solve a logic puzzle? Doesn't that happen to everyone at some point in their lives?

Yes, Madison was quite good at this little game in her own opinion. So good in fact that she didn't even flinch when he dropped her again and didn't twitch a muscle as she heard a surprised (Vaguely feminine?) cry.

She'd been doing magnificently, but was forced to give up on her perfect score after receiving a kick to the gut.

"Madison? That you?"

Madison looked up and, oh, look at that. Sophia must have been caught by that monster, died and went to hell too, cause there she was, wearing some kind of ramshackle skirt/bikini combo. She narrowed her eyes at the sight. Bikinis weren't supposed to be black. Sophia was spitting on everything Madison could never have, and she felt an irrational sort of anger.

"Yeah Sophs, what's going on? Who's the ganger?" Sophia glanced back at the Asian kid. She hadn't even learned his name, but he'd never asked for her's, so she didn't feel too bad.

"Uh, I dunno. Splodey-kid, I guess. He uh, blows stuff up."

"What, like he has a bunch of grenades and stuff?"

"Well no-"

"So he turns whatever he touches into a bomb?"

"Not reall-"

"He atomizes objects in a line of sight?"

"No, listen, how he does it isn't really important. He doesn't really have a secret identity, so you'll probably see it soon. How'd you get here? Has there been any news of my disappearance?"

Madison gave Sophia a funny look, like she'd asked if it was okay to eat your cereal with juice. "If by 'any news' you mean 'national outcry and horror', the answer's no. Sorry Sophs, but you're just another one of Slipnote's victims, mourned for a weekend before the world moved on to the next atrocity. I guess that's how I'll end up, too."

Sophia knew Madison wasn't one of the sharpest knives in the sink, but had she always been this bitchy? "What the fuck? What the actual fuck Madison. What does that even mean? Who's Slipnote?"

Madison gave her a funny look, like Sophia had confessed that she'd forgotten her left from her right.

"Did you forget, or were you not paying attention? Slipnote is Taylor. She triggered, remember? You were her first victim."


	3. Chapter 3

Taylor had been dreaming of getting powers since she was a little girl. She thought it would aid her every ambition and, later, solve her every problem. It didn't though. It just made her lonelier than ever.

ooOOoo

Madison was starting to get a feel for the tempo between Sophia and the boy, Bakugou. She'd extracted his name after an afternoon that was particularly painful for all parties involved, a mish mash of half remembered Japanese and English on Madison and Bakugou's part, respectively. In the preceding days she'd discovered and fell comfortably into her own responsibilities while Sophia and Bakugou more or less squabbled about theirs.

Whose turn was it to catch dinner? Not Madison's problem, she just cooked it. Oh, It was definitely Sophia's fault that Bakugou'd torn his shirt? Not to worry, Madison need only devote a bit of thread and five minutes time to fix the problem. Madison privately wondered if this was what it was like to have children, or maybe two very rowdy dogs.

Wouldn't that make her a single mother though? She couldn't really see Bakugou as the fatherly type and Sophia… Well, God help any son of her's should she ever get around to procreating. It was just a little too easy to imagine Sophia getting into a fist fight with him.

Things had been going smoothly, things had been _nice_ in a way that Madison hadn't enjoyed for a long time. She thought she wouldn't have minded if it lasted forever.

Bakugou was less patient. In his mind the two weeks spent on the island was already close enough to an eternity. It was late on what would have been a saturday night anywhere else in the world that he'd decided he was going to do something about it.

It was short work blasting down enough trees to build a raft, but shaping them into something sea-worthy was another challenge altogether. He worked through the night while Sophia slept and Madison watched.

Madison was scared. She'd seen that same look in Sophia's eyes enough times to know there was nothing but trouble to come. Even she could see that a raft wasn't enough to make it back to Brockton Bay, and she was a little afraid that Bakugou knew it too and he just didn't care. So, as the sun rose, Madison knew what she had to do.

The easiest step would be to stop him at the lowest level by keeping him from completing his vessel. While she was fairly certain she wouldn't have to intervene to watch it sink, she'd prefer if it was on dry land where Bakugou couldn't point those smoldering, accusing eyes on her while he was dripping wet, his tank top clinging to his chiseled muscles. That always made Madison freeze, wide eyed and red in the face. Probably a fear reaction, she decided.

She found him half asleep and still using a series of fine explosion to craft a sort of rudder. She wondered briefly at the wisdom of using explosions to shape a wooden raft but discarded the thought quickly when she realized he was nearly finished with nary a wayward scorch.

It was vaguely shaped like a hand, the thumb hooking onto the side of the raft and-

Oh, yep, a mighty middle finger saluting any who dared doubt him. Fearless, noble, and also picking a fight with Murphy. Madison admired that kind of attitude, part of the reason she'd hung out with Sophia and Emma, matter o' fact.

She hid behind a bush and engaged her brain housing group, something she hadn't had to do too often after she'd started hanging out with the girls. She was a little out of practice, so the best she could think of was to distract him with her feminine(?) wiles and then set fire to the raft or something. Maybe make like a Bakugou and blow it to smithereens, or some other suitable theoretically teeny tiny shmutz.

The logical step one for any teenage girl would be to take off her shirt, but Madison was just a little too conscious of her lack of _*ahem*_ tactical options with that course of action to seriously consider it. She never thought the day would come when she identified with Taylor, but who knows, the flying pigs could be right around the corner.

Instead, she elected to saunter up to him, in clear view with her hands where he could see them. It had only taken once to learn that lesson. He looked up long enough to recognize her and check that she wasn't holding a weapon before he went back to carefully shaping his rudder like a master sculptor might carve an especially offensive bishop for the world's angriest chess set.

It had only taken her a few days to learn that he was an unexpectedly diligent boy who always went to sleep according to an internalized schedule. His staying up all night had played hell with that delicate balance he'd cultivated. All she'd seen was a glimpse of the heavy bags under his eyes and she could tell he felt like death warmed over in the sort of gas station microwave that left one side of your burrito half frozen.

She smiled a malicious sort of smile that you'd see on a babysitter who'd just manipulated her charge into eating his cereal with juice. This would be easier than stealing candy from a baby, which she cold vouch was already pretty easy. There was no way he could resist her in this weakened state!

Madison sidled up to him, keeping a careful distance from his hands and making sure he had at least some cognizance of her with every move. It didn't take a Thinker to realize that startling Bakugou was a bad idea on any day, least of all when he's so emotionally vulnerable(?).

She closed the distance with the clumsy grace of a drunk goose, bumping his hand ever so slightly. He scowled as he blasted the fingernail from his rudder's thumb. Madison felt her heart skip a beat when he leveled that glare at her, but she steeled herself and forced words out her lips that were (In her humble no-I-don't-know-anything-don't-hurt-me opinion,) better suited for Emma.

"Um, erm, uhn, gurk."

Poetry.

Okay, maybe it was little off script. She panicked, she hadn't expected him to smell so masculine and fruity-flavored. Maybe it was all the coconuts? The few fruit trees Bakugou'd found hadn't changed the fact that their diet mainly consisted of coconut collected by Sophia prepared in a variety of interesting and dubious ways.

Bakugou cocked an eyebrow. Even with his limited knowledge of English, that didn't sound like anything more than gibberish. It was just his fucking luck he'd have to deal with quirkless retard number two so late at night. He squinted his eyes, looking for the moon but finding the sun. It was just his fucking luck he'd have to deal with quirkless retard number two so early in the morning.

Madison coughed into her hand and tried again, this time practicing what she'd say in her head. She cringed a little when she realized that's probably how Taylor talked _all the time_ , but decided she could be the bigger woman by putting that aside, for the sake of keeping Bakugou on the island.

"Hey there you sexy beast-"

She clamped her hand over her mouth. Yes, that was in fact what she'd been thinking, but not she'd been planning on saying. Dammit! How could she let this happen? Not even Taylor'd ever slipped that bad, and she'd muttered about plans to trick them into eating their own parents for two whole periods!

"Sekusi?" Bakugou mumbled, his low brow joining the higher. That word was a little more familiar, not that he'd ever admit it to anyone, least of all anyone looking for american magazines that may or may not reside under his bed. Bed. How long had he been awake? Didn't matter. He had to finish the raft, had to get back home.

First he'd have to deal with Madison. As much as he appreciated that she'd never tried to kill him, maim him, set his shit on fire, or make fun of his hair, she'd have to do a little better than that to earn the kind of goodwill needed to derail him after he'd put his mind to something. A real kicker of a favor, like finding a working radio, or whipping up some of his favorite Jalapeno steaks for dinner, or punching Sophia in the throat. The smallest of gestures could go a long way.

He gave her a derisive shake of his head and got back to work, deciding to put the more than likely handicapped girl out of his own razor sharp mind. Madison's entirely serviceable mind was racing, trying to think of a way to distract him long enough to, uh, toss the raft into a hole? She'd think of that when she got to it.

Stripping was a bust, and seducing him made her heart go doki doki _swoon~_. Her last recourse was to try and tempt him with something he'd yet to refuse.

"Breakfast?" Madison asked, the word almost sticking in her throat. If this didn't work, he'd probably finish his raft and leave with Sophia. Madison would be all by herself and probably commit suicide within the week. Maybe she'd build a respectable monument before she bit it? Leave some kind of mark on this world in a way her life had thus far failed to do?

Bakugou interrupted her funeral arrangements by perking up, showing more interest in her than ever before. Normally when the subject of food was brought up, Sophia would jump at the prospect while Bakugou would hold back, feigning indifference. That didn't stop him from taking a healthy helping of seconds and thirds, but he could give a cat a run for their money in a snooty contest.

Shit, now Madison couldn't think of anything but Bakugou dressed as a cat. If he didn't agree to the meal soon, Madison was going to start drooling.

Bakugou was having something of an internal battle. It was true, he hated looking like he wanted anything from anyone, even showing the slightest hint of it. He'd made sure to drain the fun out of every childhood Christmas for his parents, who were strangely content to let him stay in his bed for hours, scowling at the door, waiting for _them_ to get _him_.

It had been a long night though. Just the thought of it made his stomach rumble, and his mind was getting cloudy. He'd spent years toning his body to heel to his commands, he doubted even fucking Deku in the height of his delusion fueled training regime even came close to him.

Bakugou never thought he'd be tempted to break his personal code over a coconut cream pie, but here he was, and there she was, offering it to him with no reservation. She didn't hesitate, so why should he? He'd been working hard, no one expected him to be some kind of immortal that worked without sleep and labored without food.

Yeah, it couldn't hurt to take a little break, could it?

ooOOoo

Bakugou stared in shock, his sleep deprived mind struggling to comprehend the sight before him.

Madison was naked, crying in a fetal position. He turned his head to track Sophia, running around screaming and flailing her arms about. Normally he'd call her a weak-ass bitch for such a display, but he couldn't really fault her since she was currently on fire. Not that he'd ever admit it to _her_.

His raft was in several pieces, some charred, some... Soggy? He could see a few distant pieces floating in the ocean and a few closer pieces hanging from palm trees. He cast his gaze on Madison. His eyes looked just a little hurt, as hurt as Bakugou could look. He'd never been betrayed by breakfast before.

Madison noticed him and scrambled to cover up, but she didn't really need to. Bakugou was a healthy young man, and she still looked somewhere between twelve and illegal. She burst into a fresh wave of hysterics.

A tree slowly crashed to the ground, its trunk finally eaten away by the burning debris. Sophia ran past, still screaming, realizing that the ocean was a perfectly sensible way to douse a body-fire.

Bakugou never thought he'd miss bitch-ass Deku and the rest of the chuckle-fucks from class A. Still didn't, not really, but at least they'd never set his shit on fire.


	4. Chapter 4

Lung was strong, the strongest. He was the Dragon of Brockton Bay, Champion of the East, Shatterer of Eardrums and Hazer of Recruits! He held more power in his pinky toe than all the combined capes on the eastern seaboard, and had used that power countless times, poking Bakuda in the head over and over until she gave in and made him an Explosive Jalapeno sandwich, perfect in ways only she could make it.

His accomplishments were many and myriad, from beating the Protectorate into submission to resisting the Boogie Bug that had come through the Bay years ago to opening the pickled Jalapeno jar in a single try, without the slightest grunt of effort. He was fierce, he was the king, and there was no way the king was going to cower before some winged gaijin waif simply because she'd shown she was stronger than trash.

She dove at him from the sky, perhaps to pierce his flesh with her talons, but what hope had a sparrow against a dragon? She drew her many wings forward, to shield herself from the blast of flame directed her way. She didn't slow in the slightest. ' _Why?'_ Was Lung's last thought before feathers met scales and-

ooOOoo

Of all the things he'd salvaged from the sea, Bakugou could without a doubt say this was the strangest yet. Keep in mind the running included a skinny white girl, the rotting carcass of a mermaid, and a box of southern-Malaysian porn.

He tried picking it up, and when that failed him _because yesterday was arm day assholes_ , he tried poking it with a stick.

No response.

He tried throwing a rock at it.

No response.

He tried blowing it up.

No response, and he'd need to get Madison to make him a new net.

Having had exhausted every variation of the scientific method he understood, Bakugou was stumped. He'd never encountered such a stubborn thing. _Everything_ responds to being blown up, or at least it has the good sense to explode into a suitable theoretically teeny tiny shmutz. The fact that this particular… _Thing_ , was so out of the loop for proper exploding procedure meant he really didn't know what to make of it.

He shrugged a little before stomping away, as you do, to find Madison. She looked like she read a lot of Detective Conan. She'd know what to do.

As soon as he left though, the egg shook. It cracked. It trilled a sweet little song, one that attracted Sophia's attention as she passed by. She stalked closer to investigate, wary of another of Bakugou's surprise attacks. He'd decided that both the girls were far too comfortable, and had come up with the attacks to ward away complacency. Or he was bored and enjoyed jumping them when they least expected it, that asshole.

It didn't really matter which it was. Bakugou was nowhere to be seen, and a mysterious egg was hatching before Sophia's eyes. The miracle of birth was not unfamiliar to her. Often enough when stopping thugs and rapists, she'd encounter young mothers in the throws of birthing contractions. It was after the third or fourth alley birth she'd witnessed that it occured that she might get some good cookie points for helping out. For that reason she'd shadowed Panacea for a good week and a half before realizing, in an odd moment of clarity, that Panacea would have absolutely nothing to do with birthing children.

She'd eventually had to pick up an extra assignment in her civilian identity so she could intern with a midwife. One of the worst decisions of her life, but that meant that she wasn't the least bit surprised when the beautiful gift of life decided to manifest itself as a mouldering lump of feathers and slime as the egg hatched and a sleek black creature slithered forth, its trilling song traded for a hungry whine.

Sophia looked into its retarded looking face and fell madly in love, a maternal instinct she, Taylor, the entirety of the Wards and a good three quarters of PHO never thought existed blooming to life within her.

She named her child Chainsaw the Bloodstain.

Somewhere far away Sophia's mother was crying silent tears.

 _Mia bombina, Mi hai lasciato!_

Meanwhile, Bakugou was still searching for Madison, who was nowhere to be found. Or rather, nowhere he looked. She was still very self conscious around him and had decided she was better off avoiding him for a little while. This wasn't something he knew about, and he trawled on. He searched in the caverns, fighting massive crabs and cave spiders. He searched for her in the forest, avoiding dive bombing coconuts and screeching chimps. He searched by the sea, repelling invading dolphins and solving logic puzzles to travel between each area of the shore. He assumed Madison had set them up.

He was wrong.

Madison had long since discovered Sophia and her adopted child, which was actually quite large and soft and goodness those were a healthy set of talons weren't they? Makes one wonder at the wisdom of trying to feed it green coconuts, like Sophia was doing. Anyone familiar with her personal philosophy would find it odd that she was trying to feed such an obviously carnivorous creature tropical fruits, but it could be that they hadn't come to terms with Sophia's new found obsession with coconuts.

They were what got her through those trying first days, what had molded her personality when it was in flux after being banished from all she knew and loved(?). They shaped her in the same way they shaped hundreds of tropical civilizations throughout history. They spoke to her of philosophy, in that though the coconut is a sphere, it is not perfect. It doesn't have to be, and neither do you. It spoke of history, the tree grew and struggled to yield the coconut, that would have done the same if not for human intervention. It spoke of faith, that even though it knew not the sea, its dangers, or its ways, it fearlessly hurled itself into the waves in order to wash upon foreign soil and begin life anew.

Sophia would have been a much better person if she had heeded these lessons instead of developing a strange obsession.

Chainsaw saw the value in neither the lessons the coconut whispered or the fruit with which it had grown. It craved flesh on an instinctual level common in every creature on this planet but humans, it would appear. It had never indulged the savory taste of meat, but Chainsaw the Bloodstain craved it none the less.

Sophia couldn't see this, but Madison was more of a nurturing type, for a certain value of nurturing, and recognized the signs after only a short struggle. She tried bringing up the point, but Sophia was being especially bullheaded that day, which was surprising because she had a very predictable schedule that dictated her mood for the day. Madison had figured it all out and even used it to plan meals, when to eat this, when to avoid that, when to cook two of those.

It was only Tuesday though, and Sophia wasn't due for a stubborn fit till Friday at earliest.

Madison pouted, then frowned when she realized there was no one around who'd appreciate the show. When Sophia got into these kinds of moods Madison used to just avoid her for the day, but here on the island that was a less than safe option. They'd recently found that anywhere beyond the shallowest part of the jungle was infested with all sorts of evil sounding creatures that probably liked eating beautiful late bloomers. Not a good environment for a delicate flower like Madison.

These days the best way to deal with Sophia was to set Bakugou against her. Which involved talking to Bakugou. Which was something Madison would rather avoid, what with her own confusing feeling she'd yet to sort out. Maybe she could just ignore the issue? It'd probably be fine. Sophia would figure it out eventually, right? Nature had a way of surviving, didn't it? The odd creature Sophia had found could hunt for itself, right? It's not like it'd die of starvation. What kind of mother was retarded enough to accidentally get her own kid killed…?

Madison groaned. She was going to turn into an old cat lady that picked up every stray she found, wasn't she? Yes, this bleeding heart of a girl probably was. No, men didn't date women that had more cats than friends. Yes, some day she'd come to terms with it. In the meantime she set off into the shallowest parts of the jungle, straining to hear the tell tale explosions that would lead her right to Bakugou.

The jungle was silent though, because Bakugou had failed. He'd thought he could cheat a portion of the logic puzzle with his explosions, but that'd just fucked everything up. The trap had been sprung and now he was more alone than he ever thought anyone in the world could ever be. He sat in the dark, the shadows thrusting his every mistake and inadequacy in his face. Every friend he'd burned, every time he'd spit in his mother's face, every moment he was sure would make All Might, his idol, cringe in shame. He'd fucked it all up. The puzzle, his life, everyone he'd ever known him. Where did he get off thinking he deserved to be a hero when he hadn't done anything but make people miserable?

Would he be doing the world a favor if he never made it off this island…?

The shadows started whispering things to him, dreadful things, confusing things, whiny things-

Bakugou's ear twitched. That wasn't the darkness whispering to him, that was Madison. She must have been pretty far away if her shouting sounded like whispering. Or she just had some weak-ass volume. It didn't matter to Bakugou much, he wasn't really in the mood to deride her for her many, many shortcomings. He looked up, but was still shrouded in darkness, maybe he'd never see light again.

The paper bag was especially soggy though, so Madison didn't have any trouble tearing it off Bakugou's head. He blinked, craning his head back to look at her. She blushed. The sight was surprising exhilarating for her.

"We, uh. Sophia, baby, erm. Meat."

Just a tad too exhilarating.

"Um, erm. Uh." Madison grunted, pointing back in the direction she'd come from.

Bakugou nodded sagely. Sophia was being weird again. Just a year ago if you'd asked him if he ever thought he'd become proficient in American slang he would've aggressively blown up your homework and angrily eaten your lunch for being such an idiot, but the world can be a strange place, and he felt like he'd made great progress. The retards back home would be green with envy when he showed them all the English he'd learned!

Bakugou hopped to his feet and started walking. He had a good idea where Sophia would be. Her weirdness could be predicted to an uncanny level of accuracy.

ooOOoo

"No! You can't go!"

"Please, mother, this is something I must do. It is the path all my kind strut."

"But, but you're just a day old! You can't go out on your own! I, I'm not ready!"

Madison and Bakugou watched silently from the side, silent as they witnessed a side of Sophia that in ninety nine timelines out of a hundred got XxVoidCowboyxX several infractions for suggesting and a full on ban in the hundredth.

Tears and snot mingled down her face as she clutched what Bakugou could only figure was an enormous black chicken dinosaur. A fairly snappily dressed one at that, if the top hat and coattails were anything to judge by. It looked down at its mother, its face a tableau of emotion. It longed to fly, to heed its instincts and conquer the sky and distant lands, but its heart broke for its mother that sobbed at its talons.

"This isn't about you mother. Letting go is a part of growing up, surely your own mother experienced the same."

No, she hadn't. Her child had been ripped from her without a moment to say goodbye. She still dreamed of her little girl that she'd lost. She cried herself to sleep while Sophia's little sister listened, her own heart growing dark and twisted.

Sophia didn't know that and she probably wouldn't have cared if she did.

"Chainsaw! Please!" Sophia begged, but Chainsaw had already stayed too long. Atop a sand dune as they were, all it took was a flap of its wings to cast Sophia aside and launch itself into the air. It looked over its shoulder and gave Sophia one last sad look before it flew off over the horizon.

Sophia fell to her knees, sobbing into her hands. Madison wrapped her arms around Sophia, trying to comfort her in her time of being a piss-stained wuss shit.

Sophia pushed her off the dune.

Bakugou did the same to Sophia with a kick.


	5. Chapter 5

Danny Hebert hung his head, hiding it under his arms. He kept running the encounter through his head over and over. What could he have done different? Could he have prevented all this? He would've given both his arms, every cent that he owned, and eaten cereal with juice for the rest of his life if only he were given the barest hint, the smallest indication to help him avoid this whole disaster.

That wasn't an option though. He'd failed as a father on such a fundamental level that his daughter's only option was to sprout wings and fly away.

He felt a tap on his shoulder and looked up. It was a testament to how preoccupied he was that he didn't even react to the sinuous tongue that had gotten his attention. He simply followed it to a young girl hanging off the side of a bubbling pool. She reminded him vaguely of Taylor. Was it her mouth? Or was it those large eyes that seemed to shine?

She spoke in a voice as beautiful and incomprehensible as ringing bells. Danny could only give her a confused look and the large man behind her snorted.

"She said," Lung rumbled from his own lounging position. "You look like shit. Come bathe."

Tsuyu glared at him. That was _not_ what she'd said, but she didn't have the vocabulary to correct the issue. Danny examined the pair. Neither seemed to think the least of bathing out in the open together. A half remembered conversation with Annette suggested it was a cultural thing. He sighed. It did look inviting, even if Danny was sure it wouldn't be much of a hot spring without Lung there.

On the other hand, taking a bath with a girl young enough to be Taylor's sister…

Ehh…

Danny suddenly felt the urge to give Lung a stern talking to and make him promise to get her home by ten. The fact that they weren't going anywhere or that none of them _could_ return home did nothing to abate the knee-jerk reaction to realizing he had a duty to preserve the innocence of this child. Maybe it was too late for Taylor, but life has a way of going on.

ooOOoo

Bakugou gave the dish a bland look. It was some kind of shellfish, he could tell that much, but beyond that? It was a complete mystery. How'd it been prepared? How long had it been dead? Was it supposed to be bubbling like that?

He gave Madison a sidelong glance, but she was mesmerized by the _thing_ set before her. Friday had rolled around and Sophia was in one of her stubborn moods again. She'd demanded to make breakfast. Madison had tried to offer her tips and hints, but Sophia had firmly refused them. Survivors didn't need help cooking from whatever it was Madison was.

She'd worked feverishly through the night and saturday morning saw the lot of them sitting before the completed... Well, we'll be generous and call it a meal. It was thick and oozy with a sort of yellowish film floating over the top. Despite the deviation from accepted cuisine, or perhaps because of it, Sophia beamed proudly at Bakugou and Madison. She thought she'd done a good job.

Madison met Bakugou's eyes. It was pretty clear that neither of them wanted to do this. They weren't afraid for their lives, per se, but they didn't want to push their luck in any way. Bakugou was about to call it pig shit and chuck the slop, but Madison quickly flicked her eyes from the food then back to Bakugou. His eyes widened a fraction. She was calling his masculinity into question, _challenging_ him to eat the poison in front of him.

Bakugou was somewhere between fourteen and fifteen years old. Let's suppose that he didn't really develop a personality until the age of four, that leaves over ten years of conscious choice on his part. In those ten years, he'd not once backed down from a challenge, whether it was from his friends, his parents, or God himself. The surest way to get Bakugou to do something was to insinuate that he couldn't.

He screwed his face against the smell before grabbing the bowl and downing it in a single draught. Madison stared wide eyed, hands over her mouth. That was in no way what she had wanted him to do. She had, as a matter of fact, been signalling him to pretend to sneeze and spill it out. Never in her life had any of her plans gone so horrifically wrong.

Well, one had.

Bakugou's face went green and he felt a foam build in his mouth. This happened every now and again, but normally only after he'd come back from the dentist. They had this odd idea that growing teenagers needed a mouth full of fluoride every month. He'd come to a sort of agreement with his parents to cut back to every other month if he promised to keep his teeth spotless. (During particularly boring game nights his parents would often gamble the responsibility of checking his teeth for the week.) The last thing he saw before passing out was four swirling Madisons screaming as he fell to the ground.

It was lucky for him that he was out before Sophia called him a bitch, because he was in no shape to beat the shit out of her, and it would bug him for weeks if he didn't. Fucking Deku might have thought it was sweet that the two had grown close enough to get into fist fights, but he was a bitch ass shit tissue, so his idea of 'sweet' was obviously skewed and perverted, like some kind of dick head that looks at a pizza and says to himself _I'm gonna eat that with a fork._

Absolute jackass.

Fucking Deku.

Madison gaped. She kept looking from Bakugou to Sophia and back, trying to register what she'd just seen, whether she should try contacting the police, and whether Sophia would try to kill her too to get rid of any witnesses.

Sophia didn't make any moves towards Madison though, which may or may not be a good sign. She just furrowed her brow, grabbed Madison's bowl and stalked off, muttering something about crab and fermented coconut.

Madison's eyes flicked back to Bakugou. He was still foaming at the mouth and twitching every so often. It sorta grossed her out, and the residual smell wasn't doing her stomach any favors. Yuck, his eyes were starting to bulge.

He's, he's gonna be okay, right? It's not like Sophia could put together _actual_ poison and call it food. She wouldn't serve it to them without tasting it or something. Probably. Besides, Bakugou was a tough guy, he'd be fine. Yeah, everything was going to be ok. O, k.

Ok.

Madison started hyperventilating.

ooOOoo

Bakugou didn't come to that night, or the next morning, or the morning after. After Madison had dragged him back to the campsite they all called home, he'd been bedridden with the sort of fever that she was sure Sophia would try roasting coconut over, were he unguarded. Mostly he thrashed about in his cot, mumbling his strange language.

"Kaa-san... Kaa-san, gomen…"

The words gave Madison a strange gurgling in her stomach. It could also have been caused by her lack of food. Sophia was still gone, and with Bakugou out of commision, that meant there wasn't anyone to hunt, which meant there wasn't anything to cook, which meant there wasn't anything to eat. An altogether miserable situation that, back home, Madison would have bitched about petulantly.

As it was though, she didn't have much spare time to bitch. She wasn't good at multitasking like Sophia was. _She_ could bitch no matter what she was doing, like she was some kind of secret cape and that was her power. Super bitching, a kind of reverse Master power that made anyone who heard her do the opposite of what she said because she was such a massive bitch.

Madison didn't really believe that, even if it was more likely than if she was _actually_ such a massive bitch naturally. That would mean that she'd been a cape this whole time and had never told Madison, which she would have called bullshit on if anyone had even suggested it.

They were friends. Sophia wouldn't keep something like that from her.

None of her musings filled her stomach however, and she realized that soon enough Bakugou would have the same issue. He didn't look like he was getting any better either, so hoping for him to do it was out of the question. Maybe if she could find Sophia…?

No. Sophia was reliable about many things. About picking green coconuts, about being a bitch, about almost making Madison cry, and about her weird moods. About anything useful though? No, not reliable in the least. Madison was on her own.

She sighed, hemming and hawing for a good twenty minutes, just to see if _maybe_ Sophia would come back in time to get the groceries. She didn't. Madison sighed again, the deep and world-weary sigh of a child whose parents had decided they were old enough to have their TV show interrupted to go and do the shopping.

So she went to rise, but as she did her hand was gripped. Her face paled. She'd thought Bakugou and Sophia had driven off the Finger Crabs, but now that she thought about it they were very vindictive creatures, and now they were back for revenge. Madison had told the others not to set their nests on fire, but of course they didn't listen.

Now they were going to drag her and Bakugou into some other nest they built and eat their heads. Not the rest of them, the Finger Crabs would use their bodies to incubate their eggs. They'd die horribly and shamefully for the sake of a new generation of horrible shameful creatures.

Madison gulped and looked down, already resigned to her fate. She'd always wanted to be a mother, and now she sort of would be, in a messed up, Taylor-Would-Justify-It kind of way.

It was not the Finger Crabs. They were dead. It was Bakugou who'd grabbed her wrist in a stupor. His eyes were clouded, but open enough to pierce her soul. She froze, her face changing from white to flaming, molten, Bakugou-Would-Be-Happy-With-That-Color-Explosion red.

But it wasn't an explosion, so he wasn't happy. Mostly he was unconscious, his mind off and away in a place that didn't exist anymore and hadn't for years. Through his mind's eye he saw into the past and in his sickness his mind conjured up that one constant in his life. The one comfort he'd ever known in times of weakness such as this.

His lips parted, but they were dry and could only make whistling sounds. He blinked, confused, then tried again, with the same results. His mouth bobbed open and closed like an unusually angry, tired fish. On his fifth try, he made a sound, but just a single syllable. Unrecognizable. Madison watched wide eyed, too stupid to do anything else.

On his ninth attempt, he spoke a word. On his tenth, he said another.

"Kaa-san… Tomaru..." Barely a whisper, just a breath on the wind.

Madison didn't have the vocabulary to understand what he was saying, but she didn't need to.

ooOOoo

When Sophia finally returned, a steaming bowl of gray colored glop in hand, she found Bakugou asleep in his tent and a wide eyed, trembling Madison laying beside him, their hands clasped together.

'Help me!' Madison mouthed. She'd been laying beside Bakugou for the better part of two hours now, and he'd been mumbling things in his sleep. Things that Madison would rather forget about, even though she knew the images would be burned into her head forever. Bakugou shifted a little, turned and faced Sophia.

She kicked him in the gut.


	6. Chapter 6

A long time ago on a distant continent, a single mother bore an evil child. In another time and place that mother would meet a vampire, and she and her child would serve him and she would show him how to attain Heaven.

In this time and place, however, the vampire never came. Her child died in an alley and she was plagued with terrible dreams filled with flames and terror and wrath. She wrote what her dreams showed her in a book that she quickly realized would get her killed, should anyone find that she possessed it.

So she left that continent and sailed for many days, through rain and storm and freezing cold, until she landed on an island. She hid the book on that island and build traps and puzzles to guard it past her demise. She didn't pray to God, she believed she had given up that right years ago, but she begged whatever other forces that may exist that only one who was worthy would solve the traps and find the book.

For whoever found that book would have the only recipe on earth that illustrated how one might attain Hell.

ooOOoo

Bakugou was getting impatient. All he'd wanted was to get some real food. Madison had said that if he found something good she could _make_ something good, which made sense to him. The Island had other ideas though, because not twenty feet into the jungle where the good stuff was hiding, quaking in terror at their imminent consumption no doubt, a seemingly sturdy bluff had pulled a fast one and as soon as Bakugou stepped on top of it, collapsed.

He could have used his explosions to avoid falling into the pit it left, but he was too busy cursing the bluff, its mother, its sisters, the sun in the sky and Deku. Fucking Deku. a good twenty seconds passed before he landed feet first at the bottom of the pit that, oddly enough, opened up into a winding corridor.

He considered just leaving. It wouldn't have been hard. He considered torching the whole place. It wouldn't have been hard. Instead he started to set off hundreds of tiny explosions, one after the other, producing a warm glow that bathed the cave in orange light.

Bakugou was, as a central character trait, adventurous. This was more obvious in his childhood, but it can still be seen even now. The life of a pro hero is, if nothing else, full of adventure. He saw the winding passage, smelled the musty, ancient air, and couldn't help himself. If he was still a bit of a child, who could blame him?

He wandered deep into the cave, past stone formations and the weird shadows his torch sent dancing across the walls filled with pictures that made little sense and would have made even less money in a shop. Maybe Bakugou was being a bit of a harsh judge, but he refused to compromise on art.

The air got cold and damp, the musty smell giving way to mold and rot. The corridor came to an end, letting out into an expansive cavern, much larger than Bakugou thought should fit even so deep underground. In the shadows that clung to the edges of the massive room he saw torches, evenly placed and untouched by dust or tarnish. It only took a thought to light one, and with that a mechanism was tripped that sent the rest ablaze, lighting the expanse.

I could retell how Bakugou spent hours wandering that hall, somehow getting lost in that singular passage that, with every step, seemed to grow deeper still. The walls would lose their shape and come back together somewhere else. The shadows folded and corners grew out of the air. I could explain how he found strange and unsettling things in that twisting hall, pictures of creatures unfit for anything less than the nightmares of a child, then subsequently stumbling across their bones.

There were lots of things that happened down there that I could recount, but I won't, because the important bit happened at the end, so I'll skip to that.

He found a book on a shelf full of similar, but not identical, volumes. That he picked up the correct one and not a fake could be attributed more to fate or luck than any conscious decision of his own. This was a special book that was less than thrilled that after more than fifty years, thirty monsoons, and no less than twelve volcanic eruptions, it was now being removed from its spot by a grubby fifteen year old that could have stood to have found, instead, a shelf full of soap bars.

Bakugou opened and read the book. He wasn't surprised to find it was written in japanese because he was the sort of boy who took such things for granted. It only took him a minute to grasp its contents, the first page and a half was just a series of simple, if cryptic, instructions after all. The rest of the volume consisted of examples on how those instructions might be followed, though Bakugou found it less than thrilling. He didn't much like being told what to do, and would rather forge his own way than follow a beaten path.

So he flipped back to the beginning, to the instructions. They were, as previously noted, vague and cryptic, presumably so one might find a way to fulfil the requirements despite any differences in power or circumstance. He noted the first thing he needed was a strong power. Bakugou quite correctly assumed his quirk was a strong enough power for the recipe. His eyes danced across the recipe in its entirety before landing on the second ingredient. A little harder to procure, but he had the germ of an idea where he could find one.

A trustworthy friend.

Bakugou snapped the book shut and strode back to the entrance, his mind turning circles. He knew it would take some time to gather all the ingredients, but nowhere does it say he can't work on more than one at a time.

His mind kept turning, his legs kept striding, and behind him the darkness returned in his absence deeper and thicker than ever. Little creeping things crawled out the walls that began refolding themselves in Bakugou's wake, whispering sinister nothings to each other, wondering if perhaps that book had found who it was searching for. It hadn't, but that was neither here nor there.

As Bakugou climbed out the hole where it all started, the darkness thickened and the walls folded, and soon there wasn't a sign that such a place had ever existed. Bakugou didn't notice, as the whispers of the crawling things sounded uncannily like the creaking of trees and the chirping of insects. The sound of it drowned the twisting walls, and Bakugou left without a second thought or a backward glance.

Not that this was a surprising trait.

ooOOoo

"It's really not."

Sophia gave Madison a sideways glance, or at least her version of one, which could also have been Sneer No.12. Sophia took a sort of pride in having such a versatile variety of sneers.

"I _swear_ it's not." Sophia wasn't sure if she believe Madison. It's not that she was in a suspicious mood, Madison had just been kind of off lately, in a way Sophia couldn't quite put her finger on. When Madison had suggested Sophia try a new hairstyle, it had been odd. When she'd sewn together a new outfit for Sophia to wear, it had been strange. Now that she asking Sophia to read lines and do a dance routine, it was kind of off, in a way Sophia couldn't quite put her finger on.

"So, you're sure it's not a stripper dance? You're positive?" Sophia asked one last time, just to be triple sure.

For a third time Madison said "No."

Sophia wasn't sure if she was convinced. On the other hand, the girls were the only ones around. If it _was_ a stripper routine, that would be pretty gay.

Sophia narrowed her eyes. That _would_ be pretty gay.

But the relative gayness of the situation, real or imagined, never really mattered, because it was at that moment that the sky was torn to pieces and a devilish monstrosity fell through the cracks left over. It was big, with massive arms and bursting pecs. Sophia wouldn't have minded that it was completely naked except that meant its seven winding heads were in full view. Each head had a different, completely synchronized face. They each sported the sort of look that anyone who wasn't as an incredible profiler as Sophia was would have mistaken for boredom.

It wasn't boredom though. Sophia knew that, not just because she was a master at reading people, and vaguely people shaped things also, apparently, but from experience as well. It was hiding barely contained blood lust, and the facade was quickly breaking. It still looked like she did whenever she was at school, but as soon as it set eyes on her it started to look like she did whenever Taylor entered the room.

"Ah."

"Ah."

"Ah."

"Ah."

"Ah."

"Ah."

"Ah." Each head said. Its voice was like a chorus of shattering glass made all the shriller by the distinct knowledge that your mother had told you not to touch it, that it was fragile, that it wasn't meant for a game of baseball. You didn't listen though, did you? And now it was everywhere, shards in the carpet and in your cereal.

Your mother doesn't say anything about it though. She's just watching, making sure you finish your cereal.

"Sophia Hess. That is your name, isn't it? Or would you rather I call you by another name? You have so many to choose from."

Sophia froze up. This was it, after carefully concealing her true nature the entire time they'd been on the island, she was going to get ratted out by some hydra wannabe. She saw each head take a long breath down each of their long necks. She considered taking it out but, no, with seven heads she couldn't get them all before one spilled the proverbial beans.

"Queen Bitch, I think is another of your names, or maybe Demented Pyscho-Griddler, or Sophs, or Mega-Juggalo Uber-Wench, or Cry-Bitch Shit-Eater, Pisser of Coconuts. Choices choices."

Sophia's eye twitched. It may have thought it was being intimidating, repeating every name she had ever been called by, but mostly it was just making her angry. Madison was sweating bullets. She knew for a fact that it was Bakugou who'd called Sophia those things enough times to fake out a seemingly telepathic Piss-Drenched Fuck-Rancher.

"No matter," The Chorus rang. "you won't be called anything once I've done my duty. Except Pitiful, maybe, if anyone minds enough to think of you. Which, by all accounts, they won't." Another twitch, three more bites lost to grinding teeth. Sophia was something of a proud creature, in her own fashion. It bothered her to think that she could simply be forgotten. It made her angry. It made her want to make whoever it was who was implying such things unable to imply much more than that it was experiencing mind-searing pain.

But she didn't have her crossbows, those were saved for hunting, and Madison had insisted that they 'clashed' with the 'aesthetic' of her project. Sophia didn't know what that meant except that she was unarmed against a burly, herculean monstrosity that, now that the wind had changed, smelled vaguely of fruit loops.

"Someone hates you very much for now though, enough to draw my attention. Now you must be torn to pieces, and I will own a new head. Or," All seven of its current heads blinked one after the other, then turned to face Madison who had been hiding behind Sophia and making splendid headway digging an escape tunnel. "maybe two?"

Madison froze. More sweat.

"No matter." It scoffed before hurling itself at the pair, its manly, bursting pecs obscuring the view of its wicked sharp talons and decently evil pointed fangs bearing down upon them. This wasn't all that much of an issue for Sophia. With a thought her power was activated and with a twitch she flew away. Madison's eyes bulged, partly because she'd just found out that Sophia was a cape, but mostly because She hadn't taken Madison with her.

The Creature didn't mind.

Bakugou did.


	7. Chapter 7

A loud thump echoed through the empty streets. Somewhere in California a giant tree exploded. Taylor gasped, the breath knocked from her lungs. She inhaled deep enough to hiss a few curses before launching herself into the sky again. The city was quiet again for a little while. The people who hadn't been disappeared had left, and even the animals had learned to steer clear. All that were left were the bugs and the crazies.

And Taylor.

Another thump, louder than the last. Up on the moon another crater was formed. Taylor growled and screamed profanities from a mouth no longer fit for speaking english. She took a minute to vent, then took a deep breath. She gave the nearest rruined skyscraper a sideways glance before charging it. She met the base and kept going, climbing the face of the tower. Up and up she went until there wasn't any more wall to climb, then she leapt, spread each of her six wings and thrust down, lifting her into the air.

She flew until she was out of breath, then flew until her muscles burned, then flew until the freezing air caused her wings to lock up and she plummeted to the ground. She landed with a thump and somewhere in China a building crumbled to pieces. AgainTaylor screamed her rage and frustration, but the Simurgh, who flew many miles above the ruins of Brockton Bay, didn't react in the slightest. She merely kept her silent vigil, her too human face arranged much to passively, like she had something to hide.

Taylor hated her. She hated how the Simurgh flew where she could not, how the Simurgh was beautiful in every way she was ugly, how the Simurgh seemed only to be here in order to mock her appearance, and she especially hated how the Simurgh hadn't killed her yet. Taylor growled and threw herself into the air again in an attempt to disappear the smug bitch.

From the shadows of a smashed up shop, Mineta Minoru watched with a solumn expression. He watched in rapt attention as the massive naked bird lady flexed her muscles, arched her back, and took off. He watched as she almost, but not quite, reached a second massive naked bird lady. He watched as the first fell to the earth again and landed with a resounding thump.

It bothered him that such a large impact didn't shake the ground even a little bit. It bothered him that any kind of creature that touched the bird woman disappeared without a trace. What bothered him the most though was that the second bird woman seemed to be rejecting the advances of the first and the two weren't having a hot make out session.

It bothered him a whole lot.

There was nothing he could do about it though, so he simply watch as she flew and as she fell. It was later that night, as she was about to cry herself to sleep for the fourth day straight, that it occurred to him that if he could give her some good dating advice it might move things along.

He tried approaching carefully, but the closer he crept, the more the sight of her quivering body excited him and the faster he'd move. It wasn't long before he lost all semblance of control and was sprinting to her. It was only luck that he managed to slip on a piece of rubble before he could grasp her by her massive thigh.

He looked up and came back to his sense as he watched a row of ants march right into her, heedless of the fate of their brothers doing the same just a few feet before them. Each turned into nothingness, and still the column marched.

Mineta gulped and craned his head further up, until he was looking right into Taylor's eyes. Of course _his_ eyes couldn't help but wander down. They went from her sharp startled eyes to her wide mouth, filled with jagged teeth, to her collarbone that was a mess of feathers.

He of course was planning to go farther, but it was at that moment that she screamed and threw herself violently away from him, which wasn't such an odd reaction to Mineta in general. It was for that reason though that, entirely out of reflex, he swiftly popped off a ball of hair from his head and latched onto Taylor as she flew away.

Taylor wasn't strong enough to match the Simurgh for height, but that in no way meant that she was a weak flyer. She moved at breakneck pace down the desolate streets, blowing debris out of her way by the force of of her flight. Mineta hung on for his life, having affixed hairballs to each of his limbs.

' _Why aren't you disappearing?'_ whispered a voice in the back of his head, but it was drowned out by the gale. Taylor flew for what seemed like hours before she settled again at the top of fortress floating in the middle of the bay. She heaved a few heavy breaths. She'd been flying hard, and somewhere along the way it'd stopped being about keeping a person safe from her powers.

Taylor sighed. Mineta sighed. Taylor screamed. Mineta screamed. It only took another fifteen minutes of flying like a bat out of hell to realize that he was both stuck to her and completely unaffected by her powers. She fluttered down atop the wreckage of a cargo ship and hesitantly turned to look at the creature atop her back.

It was fairly easy for her to twist like that, since she'd become a bit more flexible since triggering. She could curl around and look directly at her back. The sight both aroused and intimidated Mineta, as was the case with most female villains he met.

And she couldn't be anything but a villain, he decided. There were certain feels, or themes, that he'd learned to associate with heroes and villains respectively. Normally heroes were cheerful or righteous looking, or even if their quirk happened to be on the spooky side they went for the mysterious fighter for justice look. Similarly villains tried to be as intimidating or scary or disgusting looking as they could.

A ten foot tall, six winged, talon footed, razor toothed, unblinking vagrant of a hottie fit the bill pretty nicely. Mineta briefly wondered if maybe he'd made a mistake trying to mentor her in the art of picking up chicks. No, he decided. His was a holy quest, blessed by God and assured to bear fruit. Thick, juicy fruit. Someday.

Thoughts of Yaoyorozo-chan were comforting, but not much help at the moment. Instead, Mineta did what he did best. Which is to say, he tried talking to her.

"Yo." He said, releasing a hand to wave. Mineta silently corrected his earlier statement. It looked like she did blink, though it was more out of habit than reflex. She said something back, but not in English, so Mineta didn't have the ghost of a chance understanding her.

Her hot breath washed over him, and he almost let go with his other hand. It didn't smell like decay, like he thought it would, but there was definitely something wrong with how her breath smelled. It made him gag, one way or the other.

"So- ugh- looks like you need a little help from the- ulp- love master." Mineta said, but not in English, so Taylor didn't have the ghost of a chance understanding him. She tilted her head, wracking her brain, trying to think of what the words he was saying sounded like. Something Asian, why did it sound familiar?

She said something else, a sort of inquiry-ish statement, if Mineta were to guess. He quickly flipped through all the questions she _could_ be asking him. Who are you? _Mineta Minoru, greatest lover the world has ever known._ Where did you some from? _Why from the illustrious Hero school, UA Academy._ Why aren't you ravishing me on the spot? _Well you see darling, I'm still not sure why I'm not a puff of wind like what everything else you touch seems to become. I'm being cautious, but worry not, mon cherie, your time will come._

That last one was probably what she asked, Mineta decided, so that's how he answered. Taylor tilted her head to the side, the long sentence confusing her even more. Mineta started feeling nervous. It was dark, the Simurgh covered the moon, and the bird woman's eyes shone like a cat's out of the shadows that clung to the wrecked ships around them.

Those big beautiful eyes locked with his own for a minute, maybe expecting something from him, but he failed to utter a word. Mineta saw the woman's eyes gain a watery sheen before she turned away from him, her shoulders drooping. He felt a kind of stab in his heart, if only for a moment.

"Hey, uh…" He trailed off. He saw her perk up a bit before turning again, just enough to watch him out of one eye. He went to pat her back, but stopped jerkily, patting his hairball lamely instead.

"It's gonna be okay, or something like that…"

Taylor didn't know what he'd just told her, but she got the feeling that everything was going to be okay. She thought back to what he'd said. Daijobu. What a warm sounding word.

Miles above the pair, as if woken from a deep sleep, the Simurgh began to move.


	8. Interlude: The Simurgh

High, high above the clouds, above the dirt, above the nonsense, and above the noise, the Simurgh slept. Her's was not a peaceful rest, nor could it be called unproductful. She did her best work while she dreamt, after all.

In her dreams she saw into the deepest, darkest depths of mankind. She saw its secrets, its makings and undoings. The most intricate clockwork laid bare before her, as easily read as an open book. All it took was a slip of the pen to rewrite it all.

Then there came an unaccountable Variable. Something alien even to her own considerable database, a creature that presented a stone tablet where there should be a sensible page. The Simurgh's quill was too delicate of an instrument to influence it.

But the Variable never acted out, never made its own adjustments. It simply lead its boring life among the common reames. It tangled itself in their lives as if it belonged, Its only notable act being that it managed to have a daughter before it died. Its stone crumbed, apparently as susceptible to time as anything else.

That should have been that, but the Variable had spawned an Outlier, an amalgam of stone and paper and ink and troughs dug so very very deep. A stalwart creature that not one of the Simurghs many strings could tug. It seemed unbreakable, but then the unthinkable happened. Surrounded by the meaningless, replaceable sheaves, harassed by so much scribbles, its paper began to wear away and its stone grew cracks.

The Simurgh dreamed of its future, and her heart began to race, though even she couldn't say why. She saw the Outlier tearing and breaking, its troughs filling in and its ink running. Why did it give such power to the rabble? The Simurgh dreamt on and saw the answer. The stone turned to dust and mixed with the ink and the scraps of paper. From the depths of an iron coffin were born wings of clay.

Then the coffin disappeared wholly and completely from the Simurgh's dream. Then the reams did the same. First the common pages, then those lengthy entries, then even the epics and myths of old. All simply gone from her sight. With a start the Simurgh realized she had made a terrible mistake. Somehow, some time ago, she'd woken from her dream and had started watching reality as it unfolded.

The Simurgh didn't sweat bullets. She can't. How long had she been awake? She didn't know, and in her ignorance she flew far and fast, until the wings of clay spread themselves to intercept her. They didn't though, because they couldn't. The Simurgh breathed a sigh of relief. She overestimated those wings. But an outlier was still an outlier, so the Simurgh went back to sleep and kept her solemn vigil.

Once more she dreamt, and in her dreams she gazed into the future. Farther and farther, until she saw something entirely unpleasant and woke with a start. The Simurgh didn't panic. She can't. She searched through the annals of history, but the wings of clay had been erased from both the before and from the about-to-be.

Even though the creature was _right there in front of her damn eyes_. The Simurgh did't get scared or confused, or frustrated. She can't. Instead she unfurled her wings and took flight to examine the creature for herself. And if no answer could be found, well, clay is as susceptible to time as anything else.


	9. Chapter 8

Sophia was going insane. Bakugou couldn't for the life of him figure out why, but it seemed that with each passing day, she got more obnoxious, more of a loudmouth, and closer and closer to actually getting into a fight with him. Bakugou'd been taught to not hit women growing up, but in his eyes, Sophia was slowly making herself less and less of a woman.

That isn't to say that it was her fault, exactly. It was a common enough fact in the cape community that you couldn't just not use your power. It would be like sitting on your ass for hours then getting mad because you got sore. Sophia knew this in the back of her head, and more and more she wondered if it wasn't worth it to reveal herself, or find some random part of the island to let loose. But no, that wouldn't work. It wasn't just the phasing, it was the chasing, the fighting, the thrill, _the hunt_ , and the most dangerous prey.

There was no prey on the island though, Sophia realized with a start. Not really. Bakugou was as far from prey as you could get, and Madison? Sophia wasn't really sure what to make of her, but at the very least there'd be no more satisfaction there than you might find in a helium filled volleyball.

So even though she realized it was happening, even though she _knew_ she was doing it, she got more obnoxious, more of a loud mouth, and more and more willing to actually get into a fight with Bakugou. This in turn was driving Bakugou up the wall, which in turn bothered Madison not unlike the way she'd be bothered watching her cat trying, and failing, to hack up a hairball. If nothing happened, she knew the two would come to blows, and poor Sophia, who was only good at running and who, despite her aggressive streak, definitely didn't know anything about how to actually fight, would get herself killed in any one of Bakugou's strong, hard blasts.

Consumed by the fiery passion of Bakugou's soul exploding through his hands, Sophia simply wouldn't survive. Madison couldn't let that happen to her friend, she decided. She'd have to sacrifice herself to the onslaught. For Sophia's sake, of course.

Of course the first step would be distracting him from Sophia, which would require making _herself_ more noticable. Which, on its own, just wouldn't happen. Sophia had that unfortunate quality that seemed to draw all eyes in a room to her, like an especially ugly pug. Madison's only recourse was to cuten the pug, so to speak. But how?

Madison made a quick catalogue of all of Sophia's terrible traits. Her lack of empathy, her lack of _manners_ , her baseless aggression, her superiority complex, her unfeminine figure, her sense of humor, the fact that she insisted on wearing the same thing every day, and of course how could Madison leave out the time she saw Sophia laughing at the end of Old Yeller? She couldn't, because her list of sins wouldn't be complete without that very specific entry.

Not that Madison would have admitted that _that_ was why she'd avoided Sophia and Emma for two weeks back in October.

Now that she thought about it though, Madison realized that there was a lot of pug to be cutened. Almost every facet of Sophia's personality was in need of a good smoothing out and polish, and Madison was no jeweler, she realized with a sinking feeling. There must be something she could do though!

There had to be something she could do to help her friend.

She made her way back to the cave from the clifftop she'd been thinking at. The Cliffs were her favorite place to do almost everything. Thinking, singing, crying, making weighty decisions, and eating if she had something she didn't want to share with the others. They didn't seem to like those cliffs with foamy grass and the soft, slippery edges, so it had turned into Madison's personal place.

The trip back wasn't long or exciting, except of course for the punji traps, but if you put your life on hold for every punji trap on the island you'd never get anywhere. Once inside, she searched through what amounted to everything she owned in the world, easily fit into the drawstring bag she'd fashioned from detritus that had floated onto the beach.

Some worn shoes, not Sophia's size. A collection of shells Madison had intended on crushing into powder for a makeshift makeup set, which wouldn't be helpful since all the shells were spring and Sophia was definitely an autumn. A couple of the scales from the Mermaid Bakugou had found a couple months back, which Sophia would have to pry out of Madison's cold dead hands. In fact, Madison slipped them into her pocket, for safe keeping. Ah! There!

Madison pulled her prize from the stash before carefully tightening the drawstrings on the bag and replacing it beside her bed in the far end of the cave. She got cold easily, so it was decided that she should sleep farthest in. She liked it fine enough, except for when it was especially windy, and she would hear hollow whispers coming through the crevices in the back as she fell asleep. She didn't like her dreams on nights like that. They reminded her far too much of home.

She wandered outside and looked at the setting sun. She'd long since lost her watch, but she could estimate easily enough that Sophia should be returning soon enough, and then Bakugou a half hour later. Sophia seemed to like the night better than the day anyway, but as the sun disappeared so did any prey worth hunting, and she would come back with the catch of the day. Madison would cook it and she would watch. She wouldn't ever eat anything she hadn't _seen_ Madison prepare. Maybe she had an allergy she was embarrassed about?

She put such thoughts away as she saw Sophia stalking out from the jungle, her expression stormy. Madison ran up to her, not noticing how empty her sack was.

"Sophi! I was going through my things, and I saw this and thought how perfect it was for you!" Madison exclaimed, offering up the deep purple ribbon fashioned from her old shirt. Sophia gave it an irritated look, which she leveled at Madison before brusquely brushing past. Madison was stunned. True, she hadn't really ever included Sophia in her 'girl' friends, treating her more like an especially vicious, especially ugly attack dog, like a pug that'd been kicked once, twice, three times too many. _Nobody_ just brushed past Madison though.

She rushed at Sophia's back, intending on tying the ribbon to her hair whether she liked it or not. Madison would make her look cute, damn it! But then poor Sophia, who was only good at running and who, despite her aggressive streak, definitely didn't know anything about how to actually fight, whirled on Madison, first grabbing her wrist then throwing her to the ground. In another instant Sophia was on top of her, holding her face to ground and twisting her wrist so that she was afraid it would break.

"It isn't smart," Sophia said with a strange echo in her voice. "to run at a predator from behind." She gave Madison another shove before getting up and stalking off. Madison cried fat tears that rolled down her cheeks like a forlorn wheel from an especially gruesome car crash. As she cleaned the dirt from her nose and tied the ribbon into her own hair, sobs still wracking her body, she came to a terrible conclusion.

Sophia was going insane.

ooOOoo

Later that night when Bakugou returned, hours later than he should have, Madison was nowhere to be seen. He didn't bother to worry until he walked in on Sophia eating a burnt coconut by the fire. Then he worried. Sophia would have forced Madison to do the cooking, but more importantly Madison wouldn't have let her cook.

"Hey fuckface, where's Madison? I ain't eating that horse shit." Sophia didn't reply, didn't even look his way. She kept eating her coconut, like she hadn't even heard him.

Bakugou snarled as he made to leap at her, hate in his eyes. He stopped himself before he struck her though. No telling if Madison would be his friend if she discovered he'd reduced Sophia to a stain on the ground in a moment of anger. He didn't _think_ she'd care, but he never thought Deku's balls would drop and he'd try entering U.A. either, so he wasn't taking any chances.

With a growl he left, igniting his palms to see in the dark. He didn't see Sophia mechanically chewing her food. He didn't see her trembling hands. He didn't see her pale face. _What did I do? What did I do? What did I do?WhatdidIdo?WhatdidIdo?WhatdidIdo?WhatdidIdowhatdidIdowhatdidIdowhatdidIdo_

She'd watched. She'd seen Madison run off in tears from the corner of her eye. She'd heard the crashing of some kind of monster landing from the ocean. She _saw_ it, a massive fish man with biceps like small cars and teeth like a coral reef. It kinda turned her on, but mostly it terrified her. She turned into shadow without hesitation and its eyes swept past where she sat without a second glance.

It raised its head, taking a breathe that Sophia could feel, the atmosphere disappearing into its lungs. Then it set off into the jungle. It moved slowly, but each of its massive steps covered meters. Sophia was frozen. She couldn't move and it felt like even her blood had turned to ice. She didn't make even an attempt to follow the monster as it plodded towards where she'd seen Madison run off to.

 _Survivor?_ The thought came unbidden. _Hide yourself. Then maybe you'll survive._

Sophia suddenly understood. She hated herself, but she understood. Bakugou returned, saying something unimportant. When had she roasted this coconut? It didn't matter, not really. Bakugou said something else, in that angry way he did, before leaving. To look for Madison?

 _He was going to wrong way._

Sophia wanted to scream. She didn't though. She didn't do anything.

A creeping, itching darkness began to crawl into her head, so much darker than her own shadows she wrapped herself in. It snuck into every crack in her defense and pushed and pulled. She felt like she was being torn apart, and it wasn't even anything she could attack or be angry at. _It was everything she'd ever done_. Every time she'd tripped up Hebert, every time she'd called her mom a bitch, every crook she'd pinned to a wall like an insect on display.

Every victim she hadn't saved. Every person she'd called weak and left in a dark alley without even a call to the police. Every face screwed in pain, in hate, in terror, in disgust. They called to her, tugged at her hair, kicked at her boots. Sophia faintly realized that she was probably having a nervous breakdown.

All the voices called for her to go one way, all those hands tugged in one direction. She didn't want to look. She didn't want to hear the piercing scream that echoed out of the jungle. She didn't want to see Bakugou streak across the sky like an unholy comet, screaming death and hate.

The night was lit up like day. The sound of it deafened Sophia, but she could still hear the bellows and roars of the beast as it tried to crush Bakugou. It only had its strength though, and Bakugou had cunning and determination. The smell of burnt Mackerel wafted from the jungle as Bakugou returned, limping, Madison unmoving in his arms.

Sophia had made a mistake. She looked when she heard them. She saw Bakugou burned by his own explosions. Sophia saw Madison's arm mangled like she'd met Hookwolf in a dark alley and offered to hook him up with Sophia's mom. She saw Madison still had that retarded ribbon in her hair, the one she'd tried to give Sophia.

Her eyes started to burn and her head felt like it was in a vice. Her stomach dropped and she almost threw up. As fat tears started to roll down her face, Bakugou refused to even look at her. Not a grumble or an insult or a snipe. He just trudged past her into their cave, and the feeling that'd been mounting for the last hour came to a terrible crescendo.

She wasn't a survivor or a hunter. She was weak and stupid and a coward.

The old Sophia wouldn't have ever felt this way, she knew, but she couldn't help it. She felt like she was going insane.


	10. Chapter 9

Bakugou found himself back on that cliff, where he'd found Madison. He didn't really like visiting, but Madison was still recovering back in their cave, and he needed a place to think. He'd only managed to avoid this most recent disaster by a hair's breadth, and it'd shaken him. It had almost ruined everything. He'd never show it, not in front of Madison or Sophia, but here, alone on this cliff, he didn't hold anything back.

It hadn't been all bad, he reflected. Madison was closer than ever to being his 'true friend', and that exhibit Sophia had made of herself the morning after was, well, telling. But, still… Fuck, he felt sick just thinking about it. He'd almost lost her. He'd almost let her die. All Might had never let anyone die. He would have saved her without breaking a sweat and without a second thought. God, even that shitstain Deku hadn't hesitated back when…

Back when…

Bakugou covered his mouth. He didn't like thinking about that day, but he made himself anyway. He forced himself to re-live the sensation, that cloying mud that stuck to his throat, the stench of it as it clung to his face. His own quirk, worse than useless, turned against him. Trapped, with no way out. In his mind's eye he saw it play in slow motion. Deku running, throwing his shitty bag full of his shitty notebooks.

All Might coming out of nowhere, raising his fist, his eyes gleaming the kind of blue you'd see on the blade of a sword, those words that struck as hard as his fist, _Detroit-_

Splash, and Bakugou was thrown to his back. A second wave struck soon after the first, and a third right after. It was on the third that Bakugou felt a weight land on his chest. The water drained away off the soft, slippery edges of the cliff, leaving Bakugou with whatever it was that the ocean had spit up.

It was kinda squishy. It was kinda soggy. It was kinda crying all over Bakugou, not that he could tell tears from ocean water. It was a little fish boy, maybe ten years old, looking at Bakugou like he was going to eat him.

Bakugou had no plans to eat the fish boy. He was more concerned with the fish boy's teeth that curled out of his mouth like coral. He clenched his hands, which was less than comfortable for the fish boy held therein. A fresh wave of tears followed, and Bakugou was suddenly at a loss.

How does one comfort a crying fish?

ooOOoo

Sophia was alone, more or less. She was at the cave, keeping an eye on Madison. She'd been asleep since the attack a few days ago. She was still breathing, and whenever Sophia poured water into her mouth she would swallow reflexively, but she hadn't made a sound or rolled around or anything. Sometimes Sophia would just stare, letting her eyes become unfocused, and Madison almost looked like she were dead, like she hadn't survived that attack.

And it made Sophia feel very, very alone, as she sat by herself and fed Madison some water every few hours.

Sophia hated how quiet it'd become. None of them had ever really been the chatty sorts, but there'd always been some kind of background noise. Bakugou's grumbling, or the stew pot bubbling, or Madison humming some inane tune. Now there was nothing, and it felt like even the island held its breath.

Maybe it was because she was alone in this way that she felt she could speak freely.

"It wasn't my fault." The words sounded hollow even to her.

"Being a predator doesn't mean being stupid." She lied. "Am I supposed to throw myself at certain death? Am I supposed to save every asshole who's retarded enough to attract monsters?" She crawled to where Madison lay, unmoving and silent. Sophia leaned over her, Madison's breath tickling her face.

"Did you think I would save you? Were you that carefree? Why? Why did you run off like that? Why didn't you just leave me alone? Why didn't you hide yourself better? Why are you so damn weak?" Madison didn't answer her. Sophia would have been surprised if she had, but that didn't stop her from wishing Madison would just wake up and make some dinner and Bakugou would stop sulking and being angry at her and she'd stop feeling so _strange_ like she had a hole in her stomach and everything would just go back to the way it was.

But Madison didn't open her eyes, and the longer she stayed this way the stranger it made Sophia feel. Why was her head swirling around? Why did she feel like she was going to throw up? Why did her legs feel so weak?

She couldn't even begin to understand.

"The fuck?" Growled a voice from the entrance. Sophia jumped away from Madison and whipped around. She took one look, then blinked. She took another then furrowed her brow. She took one final look before replying,

"The fuck yourself? What's with the fish?"

Sophia was of course referring to the sniffling fish boy clutching Bakugou. He took one look at Sophia's scowling face before burying his face in Bakugou's shoulders, a fresh wave of tears falling. Bakugou scowled at Sophia. It'd taken the entire trip back for the fish boy to calm down, and then Sophia went and set him off again.

Bakugou peeled the boy from his back and set him down away from Sophia.

"Now listen kid, Sophia's a huge asshole and an even bigger bitch, but crying just cause she makes her bitch face at you makes you an even _bigger_ bitch. Sorta. In a different sense. Get it kid? Quit being a shit wipe."

The boy didn't understand what Bakugou was saying, not because he couldn't understand English. He could. The way Bakugou talked was just mystifying to an innocent ten year old. But Bakugou had said it in a low and comforting enough tone that it reminded the boy of his own father, the memory of which was enough to calm him.

He quit his sniffling and Bakugou gave him a crooked smile before turning him around to Sophia. "I found him by the cliffs. Said he was looking for his parents."

Sophia gave him an appraising look. She took note of his hair like clipped seaweed, of silvery scales that glinted in the sunlight. She suppressed a chill and gave Bakugou a sharp look. He only gave her that crooked smile.

"I told him to fuck off, but he just started crying. Figured the racket should finally wake Madison up. Ain't no way she'd pass up the perfect chance to play house."

Sophia glanced at Madison's still form, unchanged since Bakugou and his tag-along had returned. Not likely, but since she didn't want him asking uncomfortable questions, she didn't contradict him. Ah, wait, shit, he was looking at Madison then back to Sophia. Shit. Shit, shit don't do it motherfucker, don't open your shitty damn mouth-

Bakugou looked down at the kid, who was tugging at him shirt. He said something Sophia couldn't hear, not whispering, just being damn quiet. Bakugou frowned, glancing at Madison again while blessedly glossing over Sophia. "I dunno kid, maybe I'd be more motivated if you weren't acting like such a fucking pussy though. Use your big boy voice next time."

Despite his rebuke, and despite the boy shrinking at it, Bakugou led him away, the boy scuttling after him. Bakugou stopped at the entrance, turning to toss Sophia one last quip.

"Kind of a bitch move, confessing when she ain't awake enough to reject you." Sophia gave him a blistering glare and a couple middle fingers, but said nothing as he walked away.

Bakugou chuckled as he left, but his heart wasn't in it. He glanced back at the kid, who shrunk from the look. The kid was a wimp, through and through. Jumped at every sound and burst into tears at the first sight of trouble. Kinda reminded Bakugou of Deku, only the kid was less of a shit wipe. Only a little bit though.

Bakugou felt his stomach roil. As soon as the kid had spelled out that he'd been looking for his parents Bakugou knew exactly who he was talking about. It'd be strange if Bakugou didn't, since he'd laid the both of them to rest. He'd wanted the kid to piss off, go somewhere else, anywhere else.

Bakugou didn't know if he had it in him to explain to the kid that his parents were gone.

But the kid only clung to him all the more. It pissed Bakugou off, but anytime he was about to punt the kid's sorry ass into the stratosphere, his stomach would drop and he'd forget the idea for at least a few more minutes. He had no intention on completing the set.

The two walked along the beach, Bakugou lost in thought while the kid kept a sharp eye out for anything edible. Bakugou knew that, the kid had told him he was hungry. Bakugou just hadn't quite registered the differences between the kid and your average Japanese ten year old. The first and most obvious difference being that when the kid spotted a starfish floundering in a shallow pool, he pulled it out and took a bite.

Bakugou heard the crunch and slurp and turned his head, watching in horrified fascination as this innocent child immolated the innocent invertebrate. It was cruel, it was disgusting, it was inhumane, it made Bakugou consider raising the kid as his own.

At a look from Bakugou, the kid offered the last arm of the starfish, albeit grudgingly. Bakugou hadn't been eating good food since the attack, so after seeing the kid gobble his discovery down with such gusto he was just desperate enough to try some.

Bakugou almost immediately spit it out, much to the kid's dismay.

Bakugou gave the raw lump a thoughtful look, disregarding the kid that was mourning the loss of a perfectly good snack. Maybe it he'd had some soy sauce…

In any case Bakugou turned away, making to follow the beach further east.

"Come on!" He called to the boy. He didn't turn to see if the boy was following, which was why he'd walked some distance before he noticed he was alone. At this he glanced over his shoulder to find the boy still sulking over the bit of starfish. Bakugou grimaced, his face contorted in the sort of look that wonders if the soggy kitten it had rescued from a box by the street was in fact retarded.

"Hey brat, I said come on." He snapped, loud enough that there wasn't any doubt that the kid had heard him. The boy shot him a glare through tear filled eyes. Bakugou groaned. He'd had just about enough of the water works, and was about to explain that to the kid with extreme prejudice, but the kid beat him to the punch.

The kid yelled. He screamed. He gesticulated vigorously, first at the desecrated snack, then at Bakugou, then at the sea that was starting to foam and roil. He finished his tantrum by pointing at Bakugou and yelling, in a more or less aggressive manner,

" **You're a fucker!** " Which, while accurate, stung Bakugou for a reason he couldn't identify. The boy spun on his heel and ran along the beach to the west. He didn't make it more than a few steps when a wave crashed into him, knocking him to the sand. It drug him out into the open water, tumbling head over heels. With a final middle finger the boy sank into the murky depths of the sea.

Bakugou just stood there, stunned, as the ocean once more calmed and became like glass. He clenched his fists tightly, a curl of smoke rising from each.

"Why does everything I touch turn to shit?"

ooOOoo

Sophia didn't see him again for several hours. When he did return he was dragging some kind of bird behind him. Sophia couldn't help but notice that not only were his hands burnt at the edges, the carcass appeared to be missing its head, too. Bakugou threw the catch at her.

"The fuck am I supposed to do with this?" Sophia asked as he trudged past.

"Cook it. Eat it. Or don't, I don't care."

"What happened to the fishstick?"

Bakugou lurched at the question, and Sophia swore she felt the cave get hotter. He turned just far enough to level a blistering glare at her.

"You didn't give a fuck when he showed up, don't go fucking pretending now that he's gone." With that he turned away and stalked to a more-or-less, (well, less.) isolated crevice in the corner of the cave.

Sophia stared at his back, thinking hard. Should she give him shit? Cause, he's pretty much begging for some shit. He looked like he was in a pretty bad mood though. Violent even, maybe. Buuut, wouldn't that be interesting? Fighting Bakugou when he's finally serious? On the other hand, she couldn't use her crossbows, not when she had to save them for hunting. Could she really beat him in unarmed combat? She really wanted to find out.

She rose, arms raised and ready to strike, when she heard something strange. Maybe an errant breeze, perhaps some animal out in the jungle, possibly even some rocks scraping and tumbling down the cliff face. Whatever it was, it sounded suspiciously like a sob.

Sophia relaxed her stance and grabbed the bird-thing by its tallowy legs, walking off, looking for the pit they used for compost. Sophia figured she could save their fight for a better day.


	11. Chapter 10

"Hey, Shit-face. You feed Madison water all the time, right?"

"Yeah. What's it to you?"

"So, what the fuck happens when you drink water?"

"You don't fucking die? What is your pasty-ass trying to tell me?"

"No dipshit, what _else_ happen when you drink a lot of water?"

"Well, you, uh... Shit. Did she..?"

"Yeah."

"I'm not gonna have to..?"

"You are."

"Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Must be nice snoozing all damn day."

"Shut the fuck up. You don't hear me whining."

"Cause you're not a real person, you don't have emotions, you just fake em. Look at that carefree fuckin' face she's making. Must be having good dreams."

ooOOoo

Madison was at home, her backyard to be more specific. The sun was out it all its glory and the grass was rising to greet it in a celestial embrace. Madison had made it her mission to cut that blissful meeting bitterly short, along with the grass that dared to dream. She'd been at it for a long time, all week it felt like.

Every so often a woman would come out the back patio with a glass of lemonade, just a little tart, like Madison liked it. She wouldn't pay her much attention, at most giggling as the woman's breath tickled across face. The woman didn't need to come so close to hand her a frosty glass of lemony goodness, but if Madison were being honest she didn't really mind.

As she mowed more and more of the lawn though, the sky would become fuller and fuller, almost swollen. It would become an angrier and angrier orange, with splits growing on the horizon, like an overripe pumpkin.

Madison didn't consider herself artsy, but she thought the sky was pretty at least.

She wasn't finished cutting the lawn, but she saw someone walking down the drive and stopped to watch him. A million blades of grass escaped a fate they hadn't even realized should have been theirs.

The man was tall and blond and had a scar running from the top of his head down his face and into his collarbone. When Madison looked over, he was watching the setting sun and the horizon that bowed under its weight.

Madison supposed he thought it was pretty too.

"Tell me," He said suddenly, his voice startling her enough to spill her lemonade. The grass rejoiced at the heavens' blessing. "do you believe in gravity?"

At first Madison thought that was a stupid question. Of course she believed in gravity. Then she really thought about it, examining it from many different angles. Now that she really considered it, what exactly was there to believe? Would her lack of belief somehow disturb the cosmic function?

She decided 'no', and that's what she answered. The man faced her, and Madison saw that it wasn't a single scar, but a spiderweb of them that criss-crossed his face. For a moment she thought how he must have been very handsome under that gnarled face, but was then distracted from the thought as the sky, so fat and heavy, burst like a moldy tomato.

ooOOoo

Madison was at school, working on her homework. Math, to be specific, which she'd always enjoyed because math was a system designed to make sense of this chaotic, cruel, lonely world. It made sense of it, except for when it didn't, but Madison enjoyed it nonetheless.

The rest of the room was empty except for a younger girl, a freshman maybe? Every so often she would come over to Madison to ask for help on a question, leaning close so that Madison could feel her breath tickling across her face as the girl whispered into her ear. Madison wouldn't turn to face her, but gave her the best approximation of help she could manage. Madison couldn't see the girl smiling, but she knew the girl did as she left to sit in her seat on the other side of the room.

The sun was high in the sky, and out the window Madison could see its rays bouncing off a sea of glass and polished metal that surrounded the school. Maybe even perforated the school itself. Madison hadn't left the room to check. She promised herself she would as soon as she was done with her homework, but that had been a long time ago. The room didn't have a clock for whatever reason, and it felt like she'd been working through these problems for days now.

She looked at the number that sat beside the question she was working on. 69. Madison grimaced, rubbed her head, and got back to work disassembling the offending string of characters.

Sometimes the sun would catch one of the pieces of glass just right and shine in her face. Sometimes pale yellow, sometimes green, sometimes fiery, molten red. The reflections would catch her eye and she'd look out on the sea of glass, its waves having shifted into a new mural every time. Sometimes mellow, soft shades of green, yellow and pink. Sometimes melancholy, with dour colors like black, blue, purple so dark it hurt. Sometimes angry, shards of red and pieces of polished copper, always arranged in such a way that Madison quickly looked away.

She wasn't a very deep thinker, but sometimes she thought it must some kind of metaphor for life.

Eventually the door to the classroom was opened and a man stepped in. He was tall and handsome and Madison blushed because she saw that he wasn't wearing and a shirt and well he really was very handsome. He was looking out the window at the sea of glass and iron, but asked her a question anyway.

"Tell me," He said, his voice deep and lost. "Do you believe in Gravity? That there was a reason you were doing your work in this room as I walked in?"

At first Madison felt a strange sense of deja vu, but ignored it to focus on the question. She wasn't sure how she felt about his question. What did gravity have to do with her homework? She'd been at it so long, if he happened to walk into the room _at all,_ her being here would have been inevitable. There was nothing else to it, and she explained that to him.

For a second she thought he looked disappointed, but was then distracted from him by the glass ocean, that had begun to churn and grind and scream and spill in through the windows and get inside her throat and-

ooOOoo

Madison was back at home, in the bathroom she shared with her younger brothers to be exact. They must have still been asleep, because she'd been brushing her teeth, lost in thought, for some time now without interruption. Well, not quite. Her cat would periodically wander in, hop on the sink, sniff her, and leave. Madison giggled as it's breath tickled across her face.

In the mirror she could make out the rising sun painting the horizon like candy, which Madison would have enjoyed much better than the sharp flavor of mint that filled her mouth continually. She would spit out the toothpaste, spot something on her teeth, and start over again. Sometimes she wondered if she wouldn't rather be done with it, but she knew she had to look her best for her friends at school.

Sometimes she glimpsed the shape of a bird, a crow or a raven if she had to guess, flapping across the pastel horizon. Sometimes she wished she could join them. They were so sure of where they were going and what they wanted. _She_ wasn't sure of anything except that she desperately wanted to stop brushing her teeth.

She heard the door creaking and thought her brothers had finally woken up. They hadn't, the boy she saw in the corner of her eye was too blond and too young and looked so very alone.

"Tell me, nee-san," He asked, his voice almost a whisper. "do you believe in gravity? That there was a reason that I happened to open the door? Don't you think that all meetings are a form of 'gravity'?"

Madison looked him up and down, foam dripping from her chin. She felt like she recognized him, like they'd met before. Then she realized she had, twice now. She spit out the foam and rinsed her mouth.

They'd met a total of three times now, each time in a different place and time of day. It just kept happening over and over again, so Madison figured that maybe their meeting _was_ a form of gravity, something that couldn't be put off or avoided, and she told him that.

He smiled a relieved smile. "I'm so glad you think so!"

Madison heard a crack and saw that her mirror had shattered, revealing a dark gaping hole where a wall was supposed to be. She slowly looked at the boy, who was for one reason or another no longer a little boy. He was tall and handsome and very very yellow. He saw her glance back at the hole and gave her a thumbs up.

The gesture didn't reassure Madison. She couldn't help but think something terrible was going to happen as soon as she stepped through. She looked back and noted dully that she was now also missing her sink, the mirror having somehow stretched from floor to ceiling.

She sighed.

She groaned.

She whimpered.

She walked through the shattered mirror without even a pair of socks on. The fact that she didn't get even a single piece in her foot was probably where all her luck had been siphoned to the last few months.

At first she thought it was very dark, but then she realized she had been looking at everything from the wrong angle. With a quick adjustment of perspective she realized that it was actually very bright, almost blinding. She had in fact opened her eyes.

She looked around. She saw a pool, one she didn't recognize. She looked up. She saw Sophia staring in shock and was Madison seeing things or was there a hint of relief in Sophia's eyes? She looked to her right. She saw the stump where her arm used to be. She looked down. She saw that while she wasn't naked she definitely wasn't wearing any pants.

Madison groaned. She wished she'd learn to trust her gut.


	12. Chapter 11

Sophia had been in a sort of compromising situation when Madison's eyes had first fluttered open. She was more or less justified in that position, but that didn't stop Madison from swinging at Sophia with an arm she no longer had, overcorrecting and falling right into the water. It was a miserable, awkward walk home.

It wasn't until Madison could smell the smoke in the air that she realized that Bakugou would see her, soaking wet, in her thin white top and floral skirt that could stand to lose a few inches. She quickly rolled the hem of her skirt and adjusted what was left of her bra to accentuate what she'd managed to shape from her chest. It wasn't generous, but she was trying really really hard.

The fact that the first thing she set eyes on was not in fact Bakugou but a small scaly boy made her feel just a little silly. Well, more than a little, but whether her face looked more like a beet or a pomegranate was less than important. Unless Bakugou liked pomegranates, but that was neither here nor there.

Here, she was half-dressed and soaking wet, and there, was a small, innocent, no doubt impressionable young child. Sophia gave the kid a weird look, one that, in another world, suggested that while she hadn't _not_ expected the dog to vomit its dinner of chicken nuggets and cat food back up, she was less than pleased that it had done so in her new boots. That she knew the responsibility for cleaning up the mess was going to fall to her metaphorical younger sister gave the look an odd twist.

The boy looked Madison up and down. _He_ didn't care that Madison seemed indecent. He and his family had been devout Nudists, praying to Nudine at least two times daily and observing all her commandments. It bothered him more that this new girl seemed to be taking a bread-and-water type of approach to the faith, refusing to fully expose herself to the great Nudine's myriad blessings.

It offended him spiritually to see such a lack of faith.

He didn't hold it against her though. Countering her heathanistic approach to spiritualism, Madison had the distinct social advantage of _not_ being a raging, exploding asshole that _some_ people the boy could name were, so he quickly took a shine to her. That he had recently lost his only mother figure and was very much alone in this world didn't hurt either. If someone had pointed it out, he may have felt he was acting out of character.

Or maybe he'd been out of character all along. A single snapshot into the life of a lost, orphaned fish boy left at his lowest and most desperate is hardly what one would call telling. Or maybe it is. Madison didn't know, and she hadn't even realized that she didn't know. She was only acting on as close a thing to 'instinct' as she had.

The boy gave her a nervous smile and her heart melted. Sophia glanced from one to the other, not sure what had just happened but aware that Madison had changed mental gears. She had what one could call a transparent face.

Madison crouched down and offered her hand. "My name's Madison, what's yours?"

Well, she tried to offer her hand. She had recently misplaced it, so instead of giving it a firm shake he just stared at her stump, his eyes bulging and said, with the aplomb managed only by a child, "You're arm is missing!"

Sophia gaped.

"You can't just say that!" She wanted to yell. Tried to yell, and would have if she hadn't choked on her own throat. Instead she made an awkward squawking sound. A look of horror slowly dawned on Madison's face as she stared at the offending limb. She turned it one way, then the other, making a show of examining it thoroughly.

Her eyes met the boy's.

"Where did it go?" She whispered, turning a conspiratorial eye towards Sophia who was still blue in the face. The boy followed her gaze as Madison pivoted on her heels, facing from him to Sophia.

"Stolen?" The boy gasped at the accusation. His wide eyes darting between Sophia and Madison's stump as he clutched his elbow. Sophia gave the pair a wary look, not quite sure she liked the flow of the conversation. Madison waited until she spotted a drop of sweat rolling down Sophia's temple to, very carefully, wrap her good arm around the fish boy's shoulders.

"Or maybe just lost." She conceded. "Help me look for it?"

The boy's eyes shined. Sophia watched somewhat uncomfortably as the two skipped off, literally in the boy's case. She cleared her throat meaningfully and Madison pulled discreetly on her skirt, restoring an inch or two of length. Sophia coughed into her fist, ever so politely, and to Madison's credit she only missed a step before loosening the collecting of leaves and vines one might, if they were generous, call a bra.

A handy bit of craftwomanship, if you asked Madison. To everyone else it was an obvious deathtrap in the works that would give her a fungus if it didn't strangle her first. It was an unappreciated bit of luck then that first a dunk in a pool, then a thirty minute walk, had degraded it prematurely, saving Madison from the grisly fate of fungal infection.

The makeshift bra came apart entirely at her touch, falling to the ground like so many flakes of snow on a december morning, and just like that christmas morning Madison suddenly felt a chill. She was not in fact cold. It was a matter of perspective, which may or may not have been skewed by the burning blush on her face and an conveniently timed breaze.

The boy noticed and beamed at her newfound piety. Sophia saw and couldn't even bring herself to care enough to laugh at her. Madison stood stockstill for a second, but when no one said anything she decided neither would she, and kept walking, waving her hand for the boy to grab.

When Bakugou looked up from an improvised fire pit, his breath caught in his throat. Not because Madison was ungirded, but to be fair it was easy to miss. His swept his eyes across the scene from left to right and took it all in in this order.

First was her arm, painfully and obviously _not there_. She didn't make it look like it was any more of an issue than if she'd lost her reading glasses, but a niggling thought in the back of his head suggested that Bakugou would have treated it more like losing his eyes wholesale. He briefly wondered if that would mean he'd get some cool glass eyes. He'd never considered it before but the image of flaming irises danced through his head.

Second was her face. Her cheeks were flush and her mouth was flapping open and closed like she wanted to say something but couldn't force the words out of her throat. She'd always been timid, preferring to let either him or Sophia speak so she could agree. More importantly though, it reminded him of a retarded goldfish, which brought him to the third sight.

The fish boy had returned and was clutching onto Madison's remaining hand, standing slightly behind her. He only met Bakugou's gaze for a second before looking down. Bakugou just kept staring. He was breathless. The boy was alive, he hadn't been eaten by the sea. Madison was alive, she'd finally woken up.

That niggling voice in his head spoke again. They were back, he could fix things, he could make things right again. He'd been given a second chance.

He wanted to, to… Do something. He wasn't sure. He'd never felt this way, like he'd taken a gulp of air after almost drowning. He want to yell. He wanted to blow something up. He wanted to grab the both of them and squeeze until they popped. He wanted to… Wait, that last one. Wasn't that just an aggressive hug?

Bakugou was of course intellectually familiar with the concept, but his parents, while very hands on in just about every aspect of raising a child, were strangely shy about the whole 'hugging' business. His mom would smack him on the back if she were happy or proud of him and his dad would offer a much more reasonable clap on his shoulder. But no hugs.

Could... Could he do that here? Would that be appropriate, hugging them? He quickly decided he didn't much care if it were appropriate, if he wanted to hug them he'd damn well do as he pleased. He was about to do it too, but in that moment another, darker voice whispered to him, _And what do you think you're doing? You think you deserve a do over? You think it's right that they forgive you? It isn't._

The voice was murky and oily in a distressingly familiar way. The thought stalled him long enough that the air had gained an awkward quality, neither group making a move to close the distance that was just large enough to make even the thought of conversation a non-starter. Sophia watched awkwardly from a distance, but lately she'd been awkward no matter what she was doing. Hunting food, washing clothes, or even just picking coconuts to de-stress. She'd lost that predatory grace she once had.

Even she saw how painful the silence was getting. She was starting to feel a sort of moral obligation to smooth things out, but didn't know for the life of her how. She'd already tried coughing, shuffling, glancing meaningfully at the slowly burning bird in the cook pit, even her own improvised coconut call. That had only earned her an odd look from the fish boy. Beyond that, both Madison and Bakugou had ignored her, stuck in their awkward will-he/won't-she feedback loop.

Or was it a will-I/won't-I loop, respectively?

The fish boy wouldn't have known, or even known that he didn't know. All he knew was that Madison's grip was slowly getting tighter and entirely failing to cause him even the slightest bit of pain. He was, after all, in possession of a body that, once fully grown, was built to both withstand the colossal density of the bottom of the ocean and swim against the roaring currents found there. An especially frail human girl wasn't about to pose a problem to even him, young as he was.

He didn't know any of that, either, which was more than likely the reason Bakugou had intimidated him so. Oh, sure, the boy had let his emotions get the better of him when they parted ways, but he'd a long time to cool down. The growing dread in his stomach, so cold and heavy, was proof of that.

Bakugou made to approach and the boy flinched at the attempt. Madison, desperately paying attention to everything except the look in Bakugou's eyes that made him look so strange, noticed right away and took a step back, tugging the boy behind her.

Bakugou froze, and in that instant of hesitation Madison forged ahead, eyes down and legs doing that waddle you get when short people try moving quickly without running. _Madison didn't normally waddle_ , some functional part of Bakugou's brain noted. _She must really not want to talk to you, to even hear you speak._ Bakugou very quietly and very deliberately strangled that part of his brain, but not before the thought had fallen off and nestled itself deeply into his mind.

Sophia saw him blink, first slowly but then a fair bit quicker. Bakugou's face didn't seem to know what it wanted to do. She saw his forehead crease, then straighten, then furrough. For an instant she thought she saw a lost look in his eyes, but it was gone quickly enough that she doubted if she had, in fact, seen it in the first place. He finally decided to leave his expression as the default scowl that had served him faithfully for years. If it had a harder cast to it than before, well, it had been a stressful week.

And if he then disappeared for two days before returning with a bag he hadn't left with full of unidentifiable meats, well, Sophia had seen weirder ways to blow off some steam. She didn't much mind. It had let her make sure Madison was healthy, or at least healthy enough to resume her culinary duties. She couldn't quite manage, but the fish boy had stuck around this time and made himself useful, and since Sophia wasn't an idiot, she made sure to find out as much about him as she could. You had to really _know_ anyone who cooked your food.

He was a nice kid. His favorite color was orange, he preferred crabs to coconuts, he had a curious lisp whenever he spoke, and his name was Qlark. He was on a quest to find his missing parents, and it had completely slipped Sophia's mind that Madison made a habit of wearing what was left of his mother around her waist.

It should have surprised Sophia more that it had taken as long as it did for Qlark to realize this, but she always seemed to be suddenly preoccupied whenever he came around, so you'll have to forgive the slip. He was, after all, his father's son.

A/N Save a life, leave a review


	13. Chapter 12

Madison was back in the cave grinding a collection of clams into a paste, ostensibly to add it to the growing pot of stew that represented the sum meals the group would be eating over the next few days. It was good luck that none of them were allergic to shellfish, or they may have died and then the survivors would realize that Qlark held little to no compunction for cannibalism, as far as it may be cannibalism when he was, in fact, a large species of fish and Bakugou, Sophia, and Madison were, in fact, a large species of idiots.

The effort was awkward and painstaking, the bowl held tightly between her thighs while she ground with her remaining hand. Any slip or topple would spill the bowl and it would be ten minutes of work to wash it off, recollect the paste, and begin the process again. This happened several times. Madison had never been trained to hold a bowl with her thighs.

This wouldn't normally be an issue. Qlark was more than willing to help out with the cooking, and this was just the sort of rote work that was perfect for him and hell for Madison. He wasn't around though. Madison had sent him to collect some more coconuts. Sophia kept stealing them and tossing them into the ocean crying "Be free sweet doves! Sail far across the horizon!"

Madison could appreciate the sentiment. It was probably as close to romantic as Sophia would ever get. In the meantime it meant their stew had no body, which Madison was trying to solve with the clam paste but also mostly by sending Qlark to simply get some more. They lived on a tropical island, coconuts were hardly rare.

What was rare were the times when Madison was all by herself, so Bakugou made sure to take advantage of the opportunity. He did this by lurking right outside the entrance, hemming and hawing and thinking of all kinds of excuses to just leave. The temptation was almost overpowering. Never, not once in his life, had he ever felt bad about or had to apologize for _anything_. Sure, he was punished by his parents when he acted like a little shit, but was he sorry? Was he ever guilty about what he did?

But right here, behind the very wall he was leaning on, was a girl who would be maimed for life because of him. Because he was too slow. Because he was too weak. Because he'd only thought of her as a means to an end. Not any more. From now on Madison… Madison… Madison Somethingorother was a real person. He was going to make this right.

Having found his resolve, Bakugou turned the corner and faced Madison. Or he would have, if Qlark hadn't wandered in while he was dallying. So instead of the cool, dignified entrance he had envisioned in his head, he nearly tripped over the kid, who was staring fixedly at Madison's ass. Bakugou couldn't help but screw his face in confusion. Qlark was like seven, and Madison was something-something-late-bloomer-joke.

Then Bakugou spotted the glint from her belt and felt his stomach sink. Qlark was deathly still, and silent as the grave, his eyes drinking in her every detail. She was still struggling with the clams like a retard, and every so often she'd jerk to the side and the scales at her waist would sway.

The muscles under Qlark's skin began to ripple. Fishman maturation was not connected linearly with age, as it were. It's a sort of spiritual ritual that was triggered by need. Whether it be the need to reproduce, the need to travel long and far, or the need to destroy an enemy, it didn't matter. Whatever that need might be, the Fishman body had one opportunity to configure itself just so.

Bakugou couldn't see Qlark's face, but in those moments the boy's body shifted many times, from pointed talons to bloated skin to several fetching shades of red and purple to the nubile nubs of nascent wings. These and many other features tried pushing free from his body only to be pulled back and smoothed over, many more times than anyone not as incredible as Bakugou could possibly keep track of.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the flesh on the back of Qlark's head was rent and opened to reveal a single, smoldering eye. It showed no emotion, but somehow burned in accusation all the same. Another opened on the back of his knee, then above his ear, then on his hands. His limbs buckled and shuddered, the joints all rewriting themselves in a sinewy chorus.

The horrible sucking and cracking of it all caught Madison's attention. She whirled around, afraid that the Finger Crabs had returned from the dead, but Qlark had stopped looking at her. Every eye on his body focused on Bakugou even as his muscles continued to expand, growing tighter and larger and dense like a dying star. A new mouth grew along the back of his spine in an awful jagged line, his spine repurposing itself for an evil task.

Even as Madison screamed at the transformation, Qlark's raspy voice drowned it out. "It was you. You killed her. Only a cruel, thoughtless, _arrogant_ excuse for a pile of shit like you could have." He spat, uncoiling his new body to loom over Bakugou, who had felt a horrible twisting in his stomach at the words.

"No, she was dead and rotting when I found her!" This was the wrong thing to say. With a snarl Qlark exploded into action, fresh limbs still wet with ichor grasping to tear Bakugou apart. All it took was a thought for Bakugou to take to the sky, the flash of hundreds of explosions blooming where once he stood. It was foolish for any creature to try those flames, but Qlark's skin had become gnarled and hard, perfect for deflecting the blasts in every way that made it now impossible for him to return to the sea.

"And my father? You thought I couldn't smell him?" Bakugou knew his silence damned him, but could say nothing. He could still vaguely make out Madison's screams, no longer driven by fear and disgust but by the horrified realization that the closest things she had to friends were going to tear each other limb from limb.

Qlark curled his body, striking at Bakugou from several directions with several limbs. They were still new, though, still wet from birth. They weren't near as strong or agile as they were meant to be, and so Bakugou more than easily avoided them. In a display of infernal acrobatics, he fended off the claws and malformed fins and quickly escape towards the beach.

On that beach Sophia sat, gazing at the great coconut migration she's orchestrated, her lips silently mouthing the words to a forgotten hymn. Bakugou landed beside her like a meteor and she only had enough time to turn her head before he had jumped away and been replaced by a monster straight out of her nightmares. She had intended to scream and run away as fast as her breaker form could take her, but before she could open her mouth the beast had shot off after Bakugou, bowling her over with the force of his leap.

This tactical error put the both of them above the ocean, the same waves that had greedily lapped up the coconuts thrown into its maw. This was not a permanent situation. While Bakugou was more than capable of sustaining his own flight, the momentum that held Qlark aloft was quickly dwindling. The ocean watched hungrily.

Bakugou's instincts were screaming at him. Despite the deadly arsenal now at his disposal, Qlark was not a skilled combatant by any measure of the word. He swung and flailed at Bakugou without thought or reason, driven only by an all consuming hate he'd never felt before. Every other movement would show an opening big enough to fly a plane through but any time Bakugou twitched his muscles, ready to take the shot, his stomach would rebel.

During the battle with Qlark's father, Bakugou had been driven farther and harder than ever before. He was run ragged and had taken greedy gulps of air. It was as he was indulging in that land-walker weakness that he had gotten a taste of creature's charred blood. It had been tangy and tasted like seaweed. Everytime he locked eyes with Qlark and saw his bloodlust, the flavor would fill his mouth. Bakugou felt like he was suffocating.

It finally overwhelmed him. Too many hands coming from too many directions. Bakugou re-lived that sharp panic he'd felt back when he'd fought the Finger Crabs, and maybe it was with that memory fresh in his mind that he spun, propelled by his explosions, and crashed into Qlark's shoulders with an axe-kick that could have chipped cement. Qlark dropped like a rock. The ocean licked its lips.

Madison watched in dumbfounded horror from the shore, her mouth agape. A darkness had found its way into her chest and was drawing everything in. She couldn't feel, couldn't think, couldn't speak. Her world was crashing down around her head and would vanish in a pillar of smoke and a spray of foam.

One foot moved in front of the other, and before she knew it she was thigh deep in water. She didn't know what she was doing, but her body did. She ran deeper and deeper, trying desperately to catch the falling Qlark.

But the sand was soft and yielding, and a coconut had found itself lodged beneath her feet. She lost her balance and slipped.

The ocean grinned and took a bite.

Madison's scream was cut short by a lungful of seawater. Bakugou was already falling to the sea, one hand outstretched while the other blasted him down faster. At the sound of Madison's voice he whipped his head and saw her go under.

"Sophia!" he cried, unable to split his attention between Qlark and Madison. "Sophia save her!"

Sophia was on her feet, stared dumbfounded at the scene before her. Madison, trying and failing to swim with a single arm. Qlark, who would sink like a stone as soon as he hit water and never come back up. Bakugou, trying so desperately to save them both, but swallowing his pride and asking her for help.

It was something of a crossroads for her. A single decision that would change the shape of her destiny. She reevaluated her life in that instant. What are predator and prey? Two legs of the same journey. What is a coconut? _The exact same thing_.

Life moves on, but it is life and nature itself that must be defied lest she simply be another link in the chain. She needed a guide to show her how. She needed a leader.

She did not think. She would have hesitated. She did not feel. Her heart would have frozen.

She obeyed.


	14. Chapter 13: Fourth Heroine: the Simurgh

If you were to ask either Madison or Sophia what happened next, they would give you two different answers. The one because she was unsure, and trying her best to piece together the events of that day, and the other because she was unsure, but trying her hardest to bullshit you into not catching on to the fact.

What can be agreed upon however, was that one moment Madison was flailing and drowning and being an altogether waste of space and the next she was rectifying that deficiency by becoming _nothing_ at all, which everyone knows takes up no _space_ at all.

It was a feeling both alien and oddly familiar. A full body phantom limb. The effect only lasted a few seconds before Madison become whole and full once more and, surprise surprise, immediately began 'wasting space' again.

Sophia was breathing raggedly, watching Madison waste space all over the beach and her shoes. She'd never tried phasing with another person in tow before, so the experience was a nauseating mix of exhilarating and exhausting. She lost track of time, greedily filling her lungs and counting the spots at the edge of her vision until she was snapped back to reality by a firm hand on her shoulder.

She whirled around, probably intending to look intimidating and fierce, but the movement had a resigned sort of disappointment to it, almost like when, after expending all your items and nearly dying, you find that the final boss has a _third_ final form.

But all that greeted her was Bakugou's grim visage. It was not a pretty sight. Bakugou was already a fairly dour fellow by default, that his expression ought be noted as such surely indicates the severity of his emotion, the depth of that steely determination that describes the experience of an event so traumatic as to unfold onto his face in deep lines and troughs that beset him, turning that face into a scowling mask of sorrow and disappointment.

In a word, grim.

Sophia knew what it meant, and she also knew that she didn't want anything to do with telling Madison. Bakugou didn't expect anything of the sort from her, so it worked out nicely.

Madison had never known loss back in Brockton Bay. She'd experienced betrayal, disappointment, and pain, yes, but never loss. Then she became stranded on a small tropical island and lost just about everything she'd ever known.

Then she'd lost her arm. That should have been pretty hard to top, but the world was nothing if not full of surprises. She'd have thought she'd become numb to it all, but the pain was just as fresh, just as sharp.

As the words tumbled out of Bakugou's mouth, about how the current had been too strong, about how Qlark had struggled out of his grasp, and about how the boy-turned-monster had sunk like a stone, that familiar pain returned like Madison owed it money.

It was with tears on her face and bile on her lips that Madison trudged listlessly back to their cave. She fingered the collection of scales that shone mockingly, just as beautiful as the day she'd torn them from a corpse. They'd somehow stayed with her through it all, and with every step she took they gained another pound.

Bakugou followed behind, lost in his own thoughts. He'd failed again. He'd driven Qlark away again. He'd caused Madison such grievous pain again. All Might would have been ashamed, Bakugou was sure of it. Everything he touched turned to shit. Bakugou had become something of a Negative Nancy since coming to the island, maybe the diet of coconuts and disappointment had something to do with it?

Sophia followed the pair at her own pace. She didn't feel much of anything except for a vague sense of accomplishment she didn't understand, and so subsequently ignored. She was content to stay a simple creature.

As they each dropped to sleep that night, dinner a sad, forgotten memory, Bakugou tossed and turned, plagued by doubts and frustrations. He finally fell asleep with just one thought on his mind. Before their escape, before he could complete the secret recipe, before the week was even over, something had to change.

She was blind, and could only see out of her eyes. She was deaf, and could only hear out of her ears. The world had suddenly turned infinitely big as she was reduced to something infinitely small.

She might have even cried from it all if it wasn't for the strong hand that simultaneously grasped and dwarfed her own. ' _Come along Sylvie,_ ' The hand said. ' _we're going to miss our train._ ' And so she followed.

When the Simurgh woke from the dream that was so unlike any other, she was still blind, she was still deaf, and she was crying fat tears, each large enough to drown any unfortunate soul who might have been standing beneath her.

This was not conducive to young Mineta's master plan, but he'd come back from worse.

Then the Simurgh began screaming. Not the high, lilting vehicle of chaos that the world at large knew and feared, oh no. Her cry was loud and hoarse and filled with pain.

She'd been a fool. There had been an anomaly and she should have just left it alone. She should have dropped it to the bottom of the ocean for her brother to destroy, but she hadn't and now everything was broken and her chest was bubbling over and she was hearing strange echoes that made her queasy and _it was all that girl's fault._

The Simurgh writhed on the ground in pain and Taylor couldn't do anything but watch. A hesitant, smug little smile played at her inhuman lips at the sight. The Simurgh, an Endbringer that had harassed and plagued the world, had been brought to her knees with just a touch. Shouldn't she be proud of such an accomplishment?

Mineta was nearly in tears. A bully! He'd spent all this time mentoring her and comforting her and backing her up, only to find that he'd been guiding a bully! His mind was racing, searching and pleading and spinning trying to find a way to fix everything, to get the plan back on track. One look at Bird Woman No. 1's sneering face told him it wouldn't be an easy fix though, and he almost despaired.

As triumphant as she felt, the unfamiliar feeling of victory still filling her breast, Taylor was suddenly caught short. Sure, she'd done it. She'd tagged the Simurgh and brought her to her literal and metaphorical knees, but that wasn't really what her end state had looked like. The Simurgh was supposed to be _gone_ , but still she remained. Now what? Taylor eyed the porcelain bitch where she laid, still kicking up an unholy racket and painting the sidewalk with her tears.

All at once Taylor felt a swell of anger at the sight. _How dare she? What right did she have to cry any tears after all she'd done?_ If a touch wasn't enough to disappear her, than maybe a crash would do. With a powerful beat of her wings Taylor was tens of meters into the air and spitefully took aim.

Mineta's eyes goggled at the sight. Not that it wasn't alluring, the thought of two giant women crashing into each other, but Bird Woman No. 1 well and truly looked like she was about to try and _kill_ Bird Woman No. 2. In that moment something clicked in Mineta's head, and just for that moment all the womanizing in the world came second to being a Goddamn Hero.

Taylor dropped like a bolt of lightning, her heart filled with holy justice and her razor talons stretched with ill intentions. She was going to tear that bitch's throat out if it was the last thing she did, and she really would have too if she hadn't jerked violently into the road a good ten feet short of her target.

With a squawk of surprise Taylor craned her neck and felt both shocked and betrayed to find a string of black balls anchoring her flank to a nearby lamppost. She screeched her anger at the boy who'd comforted her through the night, and though it sent a shiver down Mineta's spine he held his ground. How cool would he look if he came back to class and told everyone how he went on a crazy adventure where he rescued a giant (naked) bird woman from another giant (naked) bird woman and then helped them become (lovers) friends afterwards?

So it was the dream of being mobbed by every girl in class that spurred him on as he popped off a rabid-fire line of sticky balls, intent on restraining Bird Woman No. 1 until she calmed down. He'd salvage this mess if it was the last thing he did.

But Taylor wasn't the sort to sit idly by while someone entrapped her. Not again. She wrenched the lamp post out of the ground with a snarl, sending Mineta flying in his own right. It was a flick of his wrist that saved him from a broken leg or worse upon landing as he stuck a hasty string to the side of a crumbling tower and swung away. Taylor considered giving chase to the traitor, but muffled sobs reminded her of her mission and she grimly returned to it.

She leapt at the gently shaking heap of feathers, ramming it fully speed, her talons shrieking against the Simurgh's porcelain skin as the Simurgh shrieked in turn. Though her body bore no signs of it, another part of her had been scraped away, another wound inflicted upon her very psyche. Her defenses were quickly being eroded.

Taylor jumped into the air, intent on dealing another blow, but was again caught mid-flight by a black line that tangled three of her wings like a pair of bolas. She fell ignobly to the street, a storefront on the other side of the city exploding as she landed. She huffed in anger, producing a throaty sound that sounded much like a dog hacking up a hairball, but she would not be deterred, would not be distracted. With a vicious swipe of her talons she clawed at the Simurgh's prone form, scratching three thin lines across her face.

Mineta fell on her with a war cry that was more akin to a mewling calf, a full net beneath him as he dropped. Taylor could see neither the net nor the blood that dripped from his scalp.

Never had Mineta used his quirk so excessively, but then never had he faced such an opponent. Back during the entrance exam he'd focused on taking down the smaller bots and scoring assist point for the medium sized ones, but those strategies didn't work on Bird Woman No. 1. She moved violently and erratically, never staying in one place long enough for him to set a trap. He could only hope to catch her up in his 'fishing line' attacks, but even that soon proved insufficient. With a piercing cry that made his ears bleed, Taylor pulled with all the strength a twelve foot bird woman could afford, teaching Mineta a good lesson about being wary of brutes and handily snapping the line that'd tangled her wings all at once. A twist and flip was all it took to slip away from Mineta's falling net, and just like that she was across the street and glaring balefully at Mineta, who'd suddenly broke out into a cold sweat.

Had she always loomed like that? No no, that was ridiculous . She was crouching on her feet and her foremost set of wings like some kind of dragon, so she wasn't that tall. Probably. Except, she was a bigger girl than most, and Mineta really was kind of short, ( _Just hadn't hit his growth spurt yet,_ his mother had always assured him.) and, well. She did seem a little angry at him, didn't she? Not that this was an altogether uncommon reaction from the women he used his quirk on, but it hadn't ever been quite like this. Mineta's heart was suddenly in his throat, the fear he'd felt during the entrance exam multiplied tenfold by the woman before him.

It was in that same moment of fear, the very moment his breath hitched in his chest, that she flew at him like a shot. He took a half step backwards but it wasn't him she was aiming for. With a short, almost playful hop she'd jumped over him and collided with the Simurgh again, knocking her on her back and eliciting a scream of pain. Her cold, hard skin began going fuzzy at the edges, like a smeared painting, and Taylor knew that if she got one more good hit in the Simurgh would be gone.

"No! You can't do it!" Mineta cried, catching Taylor's exposed belly with his net and clutching on for his dear life as she flew high, high into the sky. "I'm sorry I thought you were a villain, but please! Please don't do this!"

Mineta's sobbing fell on deaf ears. Taylor had long ago lost any sympathy for traitors, and he'd managed to add himself to a short and infamous list. They'd reached a height hundreds of feet above the city, where the air was thin and cold, and Mineta found himself struggling to grip the net. The view would have been breathtaking, if he'd had any breath to spare. At the zenith of their ascent Taylor flipped to face the ground and Mineta's stomach lurched. "Please!" He begged. "We can fix this! You can apologize! We can all be friends!"

Taylor couldn't understand a word he was saying, but she was fluent enough in the pain that colored his voice. She almost faltered, but then her eyes caught the gleaming white of the Simurgh below, and from there was drawn to the broken remains of the city that used to be her home. It was all gone. The Boardwalk, the Docks, the once proud Protectorate building that had floating like a gem above the bay, all reduced the various sized pieces of rubble. Because of her, but maybe she could make it all worth it.

She looked back at the Simurgh, then again at Mineta. The boy who'd comforted her. She made up her mind and spun in a corkscrew, flinging him towards the city below, then flew after him. They were a good thirty feet above the ground when Taylor swiped him with her talons, but to Mineta it felt like inches. With a puff of air and an admittedly silly popping sound, he was gone. Taylor felt as he was thrown somewhere unimaginably far away without moving at all. It didn't make much sense to her, that feeling, but she knew she wouldn't see him again, or him her, and she knew it was better that way.

The last twenty nine feet to the ground and ultimately her target felt like they lasted an eternity, but all good things must come to an end, and she hit the ground with a crash that didn't shake even the leaves from the few remaining trees that lined the streets. When she looked down the Simurgh was nowhere to be seen, and she was tracing one more body as it slid through the fabric of reality away from her. She must have been tracking hundreds of such lines by now, but she paid them little mind. Taylor looked out upon the dusty remains of her home for a moment before idly flying out into the bay to land on the Protectorate building. She gazed towards the horizon and waited for the sun to set.

She had banished an Endbringer, but that hadn't been her plan at all. She hoped the others would come and do a better job than their sister.

Miles away, on Captain's hill, sitting behind several tons of high powered observation tech and enough camouflage to hide a small tank, Armsmaster grimaced.

One moment Mineta had been falling towards his death, the next all his momentum had been sapped away. He suffered no whiplash, because he hadn't stopped falling. It was as if he'd never fallen in the first place.

He jerked up from the bed he was lying on, shielding his eyes from the late afternoon rays that shone through a window he didn't recognize. "Ah, you're awake." Crooned a voice, and Mineta looked to see the UA academy nurse sitting at her desk. "You and your friends gave the faculty quite the scare with your disappearing act a week ago, but since you've returned I suppose we can expect the others to come along any time now."

"Disappearing act? But I wasn't… I just… I lost."

"What was that dear?" The nurse asked, growing slightly alarmed at the tears that pooled under his eyes.

"I lost. I failed."

A/N

So I've mostly migrated onto Spacebattles, which is where these chapter were first posted. I'll keep updating this fic on this site, but for those interested in my other works, the ones on this site aren't looking like they'll be updated any time soon, and all the new stuff I've written is on the other site. Thanks for reading my stuff so far, it means a lot to me.

Edit: Not sure why the chapter format shit the bed so hard the first time I uploaded, but it should be fixed now.


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